Fig. 265.—Painting at Beni-Hassan. Champollion, pl. 374.
We have already described the style and character of the paintings at Beni-Hassan. In most cases the outlines prepared for the painter do not differ from those meant for the sculptor.
We have already reproduced many works in outline in which there is nothing to show whether they are paintings or bas-reliefs. Their execution is almost identical (see Figs. 2, 5, 25, 98, 170, Vol. I.; Figs. 25, 26, 31, Vol. II). It is the same with the two wrestling scenes which we take from the frescos in which all the gymnastic exercises then in vogue are represented (Figs. 265 and 266), and with the charming group formed by an antelope and a man stroking his muzzle (Fig. 267).
Fig. 266.—Painting at Beni-Hassan. Champollion, pl. 371.
Fig. 267.—Painting at Beni-Hassan. Champollion, pl. 359.
Even at Beni-Hassan, however, there are a few paintings in which the peculiar and distinguishing characteristics of that art are to be found. The group of singers and musicians figured on this page is an instance in point. Two of the heads are shown in full face, a view which we hardly ever meet with in the bas-reliefs. The hair and the draperies are also treated in a fashion quite different from that of sculpture, at least in the case of the two musicians on the right. Their twisted tresses seem to be thrown into disorder by the energetic movements of their heads, which they seem to sway in time to the music of the flute, which is also marked by the hands of two members of the party. The deep shadows cast by their hair give a strong relief to the oval contours of the two faces which look out of the picture. The execution of the drapery is governed by the same idea, its numerous small folds are suggested by lines at slight intervals.
Fig. 268.—Painting at Beni-Hassan. Champollion, pl. 377 ter.
Fig. 269.—Painting at Thebes. From Horeau.
Fig. 270.—Painting at Thebes. From Prisse.
In the whole series of Egyptian wall-paintings I know of nothing which is more truly pictorial in character than this picture. A careful study of it might well lead us to believe that its painter deliberately set himself to cast off traditional methods, and to obtain all the effect that the skilful use of colour can give. But the seed thus cast did not spring up. Theban painting is not an advance upon that of Beni-Hassan. It hardly ever attempts the full face. It is only here and there that we can point to a work in which the brush seems to have dwelt upon a few details that would be rendered in a more summary fashion by the chisel. The mandore player in Fig. 270, who comes from the same hypogeum at Abd-el-Gournah as the Amenophis III. upon the knees of a goddess in Fig. 24, is one of these rare instances. The hair, plaited into narrow tresses and retained in place by a long comb, is carried out with quite unusual care. The areolæ of the breasts are very clearly marked, a detail which Prisse says he never met with elsewhere.[350]
Fig. 271.—Harpist. From the Description.
Fig. 272.—European prisoner. From Champollion.
Fig. 273.—Head of the same prisoner.
The slender proportions which we have already noticed as characteristic of this period are here strongly marked. They are also conspicuous in the figures in Plate II. This is a funerary scene. Three women stand before the defunct; one hands the cup for the libation, the two others play upon the flute and the harp respectively.
This fragment must have formed part of a funerary scene similar to that put before us in full by a painting in one of the tombs in the Valley of Queens at Thebes. We there see women with offerings and others playing upon musical instruments, advancing towards the deceased, who has his daughter upon his knees and his wife seated at his right hand (Fig. 269).
The two often reproduced players upon the harp in the tomb of Rameses III. (long called Bruce's Tomb, after its discoverer) belong to the same class of representations (Fig. 271). Robed in a long black mantle, the musician abandons himself entirely to his music. The draughtsmanship of the arms is faulty, but the pose of the figure is natural and life-like. The harp is very richly ornamented; its base terminates in a royal head rising from a circlet of ample necklaces. The wood seems to be inlaid with colour.
Fig. 274.—Ethiopian prisoner. Champollion, pl. 932.
Fig. 275.—Head of the same prisoner.
Among the most interesting of the painted figures in the royal tombs are the prisoners of war and other representations of foreign and conquered races. We reproduce two of these figures from the tomb of Seti I. In order that the care expended by the artist both on the costumes and upon the peculiar characteristics of the physiognomies may be appreciated, we have given their figures at full length, and also their heads upon a larger scale.
The first of these two prisoners must have been a European, according to Champollion. His white skin, his straight nose, and the tattooing upon his arms all help to prove this (Figs. 272 and 273). He is dressed in a long robe, bordered with a rich fringe and covered with ornaments. This robe is held up by a large knot over the left shoulder, but it leaves one half of his body without a covering. His profile is very curious; the nose is large and aquiline, his beard curled and wavy, and down by his right ear hangs one of those side locks which were, in Egypt, the peculiar property of infancy. Long tresses hanging down on each side of the brow, and two fringe-like bands passing round the head complete this strange head-dress.
Fig. 276.—Winged figure. Description, vol. ii. pl. 92.
The individual in the second figure appears to be an Ethiopian (Figs. 274 and 275). His costume is comparatively simple. It consists of a pair of drawers kept in place by a wide band like a baldrick, which is passed over the left shoulder and tied round the loins. The end of this baldrick hangs down between the legs; it is decorated with rosettes and edged with a band upon which circular ornaments are scattered. The almost negro features are similar to those represented in the bas-relief at the Ramesseum which is reproduced in Fig. 221. The shape of the head-dress, too, is similar. The artist has had some difficulty with the woolly hair, and has attempted to render its appearance by a series of knots strung together. In this part of the picture, as in Fig. 273, there is some conventionality, but in the outline of the figure and especially of the face, we find the characteristic genius of Egyptian art, the power to create types which are at once life-like and general, to epitomize all those attributes which constitute a species and allow it to be defined.
Fig. 277.—Winged figure. Description, vol. ii, pl. 87.
The scenes represented upon the walls of the tomb may be divided into two groups: those which are more or less historical, and those which are purely religious or mystical. Among the latter the figures of winged goddesses, of Isis and Nephthys, are frequently encountered. They are either seated or standing, carved upon the sarcophagi or painted upon the wooden mummy cases. One wing is always raised, the other lowered (Figs. 276 and 277). The artists of other Oriental races, and even of the Greeks themselves, loved to endow the figures of men and animals with wings. Egypt was the first to carry out this idea, and the winged figures which had a definite meaning when used in the tombs, came at last to be employed as mere decoration upon the industrial products which she exported through the Phœnicians. Fig. 277 comes from a royal tomb, and it shows how these winged goddesses were sometimes combined with motives, which were either purely decorative or easily used for decorative purposes. Like sphinxes and griffins, these composite forms amused the eye and were soon seized upon by the ornamentist, while their wings, which could be either closed or expanded, were useful for covering large spaces and helping to "furnish" the decoration.
We have shown the artists of ancient Egypt making naïve and sincere transcripts of reality; we have shown them, in their religious and historical scenes, inventing motives, creating types, and even aspiring to the ideal; we have yet to show that they understood fun and could enjoy a laugh. Without this last quality their art would hardly be complete. In the royal tombs at Thebes we find a lion and a donkey singing to their own accompaniment on the harp and lyre respectively.[351] This particular bent of the Egyptian artist is seen at its best, however, in a group of remains which are called the Satirical Papyri, and apparently date from the nineteenth dynasty. The Egyptians, like the Greeks after them, seem to have understood that sculpture properly speaking, the art that produces figures of large size from such materials as bronze and marble, does not lend itself to the provocation of laughter by the voluntary production of ugliness and deformity. They also perceived that such subjects were equally ill-adapted for wall paintings, whether in tombs or palaces. Among them, as among the Greeks, the grotesque was only allowed to appear where the forms were both very much smaller than life and considerably generalized. The designs traced with a light and airy hand upon such papyri as that of which the Turin Museum possesses an important fragment are examples of this treatment.
The drawings in this papyrus are not caricatures as we now understand the word. Caricature is an exaggerated portrait; it founds itself upon reality while turning it into ridicule by the accentuation of its most laughable features. But the drawings in this manuscript are inspired by the same ideas and the same intellectual bent as our modern caricatures. They respond to the universal taste of mankind for the mental relaxation afforded by parody, for the relief from the serious business of life which is to be found in comedy and burlesque. Ancient Egypt was a merry country. Its inhabitants were as pleased as children over the simplest and most homely jokes; jests, fantastic tales, and fables in which animals acted like men and women, were as popular with them as with their successors in civilisation. Their comic artists were especially fond of treating scenes of this last description, and their works often remind us of those produced in much later times for the illustration of Æsop or La Fontaine.
Fig. 278.—Battle of the Cats and Rats. From Prisse.
Prisse reproduces the most interesting part of the Turin papyrus, and we have copied a fragment of his plate (Fig. 278). "In the first group, four animals—an ass, a lion, a crocodile, and a monkey—make up a quartette, playing on such musical instruments as were then in fashion. Next comes an ass dressed, armed, and sceptred like a Pharaoh; with a majestic swagger he receives the offerings brought to him by a cat of high degree, to whom a bull is proud to act as conductor. At the side a unicorn seems to threaten a kneeling cat with its harp..... The scenes drawn below, and on a smaller scale, are no more coherent than these. In the first place we see a flock of geese in open rebellion against its conductors—three cats, one of whom has fallen under the blows of the angry birds. Next we come to a sycamore in which an hippopotamus is perched; a hawk has climbed into the tree by means of a ladder and proceeds to dislodge him; finally, we have a fortress defended by an army of cats, who are without other arms than their claws and teeth, against a storming party of rats provided with arms offensive and defensive, and led by one of their own species, who is mounted on a chariot drawn by two greyhounds.
"The artist's idea—at least in the lower part of the picture—seems to have been to paint the cats defeated by the animals upon which they prey. It is the world turned upside down, or if the painter must be credited with a deeper meaning, it is the revolt of the oppressed against the oppressor."[352]
The lower part of the plate contains a scene of the same kind taken from a papyrus in the British Museum. A flock of geese are being driven along by a cat, and a herd of goats by two wolves with crook and wallet; one of the wolves is playing on the double flute. At the other end there is a lion playing draughts with an antelope.
One of the tombs has upon its walls a picture of a humble and timid cat attempting to propitiate a lion by the offering of a goose.[353]
In the opinion of some these scenes are satires upon royalty and religion. This is an evident exaggeration. We have no reason to suppose that the Egyptian intellect ever arrived at the maturity required for scepticism. Neither the authority of Pharaoh nor that of the priests seems to have ever been called in question. But although their anger was not stirred by the government of the world, they could find something to laugh at in it. In the cat presented to an ass we cannot fail to see a parody of Pharaoh receiving the homage of some vanquished enemy. Still more personal is the cat offering a goose to a lion. The cat can only be that unlucky fellah who, in the Egypt of the Pharaohs as in that of the Khedives, has never succeeded in keeping clear of the bastinado and the corvée except by giving presents to the sheikh of his village or the mudir of the neighbouring town. In laying this scene upon the wall the artist was writing a page of his own biography and of the history of all the people about him. He revenged himself in his own way upon the greedy functionary to whom he had been compelled to offer the fatlings of his own farm-yard.
Fig. 279.—The soles of a pair of sandals. From Champollion.
Figs. 280, 281.—The god Bes. From the Louvre. Actual size.
Traces of this mocking spirit are to be found in other productions of Egyptian art. Thus the soles of those leathern or wooden sandals which have come down to our times often present a group of two prisoners, the one a negro, and the other a native, perhaps, of Libya or Syria. There can be no mistake as to the intentions of the artist. The Egyptian seems to have enjoyed a laugh at the expense of his trembling enemies. Not content with thus treading upon them at every step he took, he added insult to injury by making them grotesque (Fig. 279).
The same spirit may be recognized in those figures of Bes which are so numerous in our museums. It was by mere exaggeration of certain not uncommon features that the figure of this paunchy dwarf was arrived at. His animal grin, beady eyes, flat nose, thick lips, and pendent tongue, his short legs and salient buttocks, make up a sufficiently droll personality (Figs. 280 and 281). The comic intention is very marked in a composition reproduced by Prisse, in which a person of proportions rather less curtailed than those of the ordinary Bes, but endowed with the features, the head-dress, and the lion-like tail of that god, is shown playing upon a cithara.[354]
These productions were not always decent. The Turin papyrus contains a long priapic scene.
In the painted decorations with which the Egyptians covered every available surface, the figure played a more important part than in the case of any other people. But yet the multiplication of historical, religious, and domestic scenes, the countless groups of gods, men, and the lower animals, had their limits. However great their development might be, these traditional themes could only supply a certain number of scenes, which required, moreover, to be framed. Again, there were certain surfaces upon which the Egyptians did not, as a rule, place figures, either because they would be seen with difficulty, or, as in the case of ceilings, because taste warned them that it would be better to treat such a surface in some other fashion. Between the lofty roofs of the hypostyle halls and the sky which covers our heads the Egyptian decorator established a relationship which readily commends itself to the mind. The ceilings of the temples at Thebes had generally a blue ground, upon which vultures with their great wings outspread, floated among golden stars (Figs. 192 and 282).
Side by side with the paintings which deal with living form we find those painted ornaments which cover with their varied tints all the surfaces which are not occupied by the figure. This system of ornament went through a continual process of enrichment and complication. Its appearance in the early centuries is well shown in our two Plates, III. and IV.; the first shows the upper, the second the lower part of the western wall in the tomb of Ptah-hotep at Sakkarah. They confirm the ideas of Semper as to the origin of ornament.[355] That writer was the first to show that the basket-maker, the weaver, and the potter, originated by the mere play of their busy hands and implements those combinations of line and colour which the ornamentist turned to his own use when he had to decorate walls, cornices, and ceilings. The industries we have named are certainly older than the art of decoration, and the forms used by the latter can hardly have been transferred from it to mats, woven stuffs, and earthen vessels. In the regularity with which the lines and colours of early decoration are repeated it is easy to recognize the enforced arrangement of rushes, reeds, and flaxen threads, while chevrons and concentric circles are the obvious descendants of the marks traced by the finger or rude implement of the potter upon the soft clay.
Fig. 282.—Vultures on a ceiling.
In these examples the intentions of the decorator are easily grasped. He has begun with a ground of rush-work, like that which is also found in the tomb of Ti.[356] In the compartments between the vertical bars he has imitated the appearance of mat walls, and of windows closed by the same contrivances (see Fig. 165). As if to prevent mistakes, he has been careful to introduce the cords, rings, and lath, by which the lower ends of the mats are kept in place. The design of the ornament is quite similar to those produced to this day by the basket or mat-maker. They are squares, lozenges, and chevrons. In the middle of the lozenges we find little crosses or circles of a different colour, which help to lighten the effect. Each mat has a red border at its lower end, which forms a satisfactory tailpiece, and unites it with the straight lath. There are narrow grooves between the mats in which the chains for drawing the latter up and down seem to be imitated. In any case, this latter detail is copied from the productions of one of the oldest of civilized industries—that of the blacksmith.
FRAGMENT OF WESTERN WALL IN TOMB OF PTAH-HOTEP
Drawn in perspective to a scale of one half
Figs. 283, 284.—Details from the tomb of Ptah-hotep.
Six colours are used in this decoration: black, white, red, yellow, green, and blue. The result is sober, well-balanced, and by no means without harmony.
In other parts of the same tomb we find this taste for literal imitation applied to another theme. As interpreted by the ornamentist, lotus and papyrus were sure in time to put on conventional forms, but here those vegetables found are reproduced with a feeling for truth that could not be excelled by a modern flower painter (Fig. 283).[357] In Fig. 284 a bird among the lotus-stalks is in the grasp of a human hand.
The ornamentist also borrowed motives from those robes and carpets of varied colour, which are preserved for us in the paintings (see Fig. 285). But with time and experience his hand became more skilful, his imagination more active, and he was no longer contented to convey his ideas wholesale, from nature on the one hand, and on the other from those humble arts which flourish even in the earliest ages of every civilized society. He learnt to create designs for himself—designs which can certainly not be traced to the mats and tissues which formed his first models. Our Figure 286 will give some idea of the variety of motives to be found upon the panels and ceilings of the tombs and other buildings at Thebes. The chess-board pattern which was so much used during the Ancient Empire, is found here also; but by its side appear patterns composed of frets, meandering lines, and rosettes. Below these, again, are designs in which lines twist themselves into volutes and spirals, crossing each other and enclosing lotus flowers, rosettes, and forms like the shafts of columns. The flowers are in no way imitative; their motives have been suggested, not supplied, by nature. The papyrus may have given the first idea for the sixth of these designs, while in the last we find a motive which afterwards played an important part in Greek and Roman ornament—namely, the skull of an ox. The two specimens of this last-named motive given by Prisse, are taken from tombs of the eighteenth and twentieth dynasties.[358]
Fig. 285.—Carpet hung across a pavilion.
These tombs and the mummy cases they contain are often decorated with symbolic ornament, as well as with geometrical designs and those suggested by the national flora. The compartments of ceiling decorations have scarabs in their centres, and upon the mummy cases it is occasionally substituted for the uræus-crowned disk in the centre of a huge pair of extended wings. Beneath it, figures of Isis or Nephthys, the guardians of the tomb, are found (Fig. 287). The effect is similar to that of the winged globes which are found upon cornices. In the latter the disk which represents the sun is red, and stands boldly out from the green of the two wings. The latter, again, are relieved against a striped ground, on which bands of red, blue, and white are laid alternatively. Thanks to the happy choice of these colours, the result is excellent from a decorative point of view, and that in spite of its continual repetition and the simplicity of its lines.
Fig. 286.—Specimens of ceiling decorations. From Prisse.
TOMB OF PTAH-HOTEP
CEILING AND UPPER PART OF WESTERN WALL
Drawn in perspective to a scale of one fifth
Fig. 287.—Painting on a mummy case. Description, vol. ii. pl. 58.
Fig. 288.—Winged globe. From Prisse.
Among the original motives to be found in these paintings, there is yet another which deserves to be named for its uncommon character, we mean those tables for offerings which are shown loaded with vases and other objects of a like nature. As if to mark the importance of the funerary gifts, the stems of these tables are made so lofty that they rise high above two trees, apparently cypresses, which grew right and left of their feet (Figs. 289 and 290).
The Egyptians made use of the afterwards common decorative motive of alternate buds and open blooms of lotus, but they entirely failed to give it the lightness and elegance with which it was endowed by the Greeks. Their buds were poor and meagre, their flowers heavy, and the general design not without stiffness.[359]
The colours are often well preserved, at least in parts, and, as one combination is repeated several times, it is easy to restore the missing parts by reference to those which are intact. The gilding, however, has disappeared, and left hardly a trace behind. Gold was used pretty generally in order to give warmth and brightness. The obelisks, those of Hatasu for instance, were gilded upon all four faces; the winged globe was sometimes gilded,[360] and so were the bronze plates with which the temple doors were covered. The important part played by the gilders, some of whose books of gold have come down to our time,[361] is chiefly known to us by the inscriptions. Their employment may also be divined here and there by the fashion in which the stone has been prepared, sometimes by the peculiar colour effects in certain parts of the bas-reliefs.
In some tombs gold is found in its pure state. During the excavations at the Serapeum, Mariette opened the tomb of Ka-em-nas, a son of Rameses II. When the mummy chamber was entered, the lower parts of the walls and of the mummy cases shone with gold in the candle-light. The floor was strewn with scraps of the same metal, and as many as four books of gold leaf were found in the tomb. Mariette was then in want of funds, and in order that the excavations might proceed, he obtained authority from the French consul to sell this gold, to which of course, no scientific interest was attached. The thick gold mask of the prince and the fine jewelry which adorned his mummy are now in the Louvre.
The mummy's toe-nails, bracelets, and lips, and the linen mask over its face, were very often gilt. The feet are sometimes entirely gilt. So too is the shroud. Those of princes and great personages are sometimes covered with gold from head to foot.
Figs. 289, 290.—Tables for offerings; from the paintings in a royal tomb.
The Egyptian artisans understood these delicate operations at a very early date. Even in the tombs at Beni-Hassan we find the process of gold-beating illustrated in full. We need hardly say that a decorative industry which disposed of such complete resources, thoroughly understood what we call graining, the imitation of the veins and textures of wood, and also those of the different kinds of granite, upon other substances. In more than one instance we find the commoner kinds of stone thus made to look like rarer and more costly materials.
THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS.
The expression, industrial art, has sometimes been severely criticised, but yet it answers to a real distinction founded upon the nature of things, and we do not see that it could be dispensed with. When the artist sets about making a statue or a picture his only aim is to produce a fine work. He does not take utility, in the unphilosophic sense of the word, into account. The task which he sets before himself is to discover some form which shall truly interpret his own individual thoughts and feelings. This done, his end is accomplished. The resulting work of art is self-contained and self-sufficient. Its raison d'être is to satisfy one of the deepest and most persistent desires of the human mind, the æsthetic sentiment, or instinct for the beautiful.
In the industrial arts it is different. When a cabinet-maker or a potter sets to work to produce an easy chair, or a vase, his first idea is to make a chair in which one may sit comfortably, or a vessel to which liquids may be safely entrusted and from which they may be easily poured. At first, the artisan does not look beyond fulfilling these wants, but a time comes, and comes very soon, when he feels impelled to ornament the furniture or pottery upon which he is at work. He is no longer content to turn out that which is merely useful; he wishes everything that comes from his hands to be rich and beautiful also. He begins by adding ornament made up of dots and geometrical lines; this he soon follows up with forms borrowed from organic life, with leaves and flowers, with figures of men and animals; and from an artisan he springs at once to be an artist. But his productions are strictly works of industrial art, and although they may deserve a high place in right of their beauty, that beauty is only in some sort an excrescence, it does not affect the primary object of the matters to which it is applied, although it may greatly increase their value and interest.
In view of this definition, it may be asserted that architecture itself is one of the industrial arts. The first duty of the constructor is to make his building well fitted for the object it has to serve. The house must afford a proper shelter for its inhabitants, the tomb must preserve the corpse entrusted to it from all chance of profanation, the temple must shield the statue or the symbol of the god from curious glances, and afford convenient space for ritual celebrations. These requirements may be fulfilled by edifices which have no pretensions to beauty. With a roof and a certain number of naked walls, it is always possible to cover and enclose a given space, and to divide it into as many portions as may be desired. Such a process has nothing in common with art. Art steps in when the builder attempts to endow his work with that symmetry which does not exclude variety, with nobility of proportion, and with the charm of a decoration in which both painter and sculptor play their parts. The constructor then gives place to the architect. The latter, of course, always keeps the practical end in view, but it is not his sole preoccupation. The house, as he builds it, has to respond to all the wants, intellectual as well as corporeal, of civilized man; the tomb must embody his ideas of death and a future life; the magnificent dimensions and the gorgeous decorations of the temple must give expression to the inexpressible, must symbolize the divine majesty to the eyes of men, and help to make it comprehensible by the crowds that come to sacrifice and pray.
In all this, the rôle played by art is so preponderant that it would be unjust to class architecture among the industrial arts. The ambition of those who built the temple of Amen, at Karnak, or that of Athené, on the Acropolis, was to produce a work which should give faithful expression to the highest thoughts which the human mind can conceive. In one sense, architecture may be called the first of the arts. In those great compositions whose remains we study with such reverence, whose arrangements we endeavour with such care to re-establish, it was the architect who determined what part the painter and the sculptor should take in the work, who laid out for them the spaces they were called upon to fill.
Although we shall not include architecture among the industrial arts, the distinction which we have established loses none of its practical importance. We must acknowledge, however, that there are certain classes of objects which lie upon the border-line between the two categories, so that we have some difficulty in deciding whether they belong to fine or to industrial art. The work of some Cellini of ancient times, or of your own day, may be classed, for instance, by its general form and ostensible use, among the more or less utilitarian productions of the goldsmith or silversmith; but, on the other hand, it may be adorned with figures executed in such a fashion that we are tempted to place it among works of sculpture. Rigorous and inflexible definitions have, in fact, to be confined to the exact sciences, such as geometry. In the complexity of life, definitions and classifications can only be adhered to with a reservation. They help the historian to find his way amid the infinite diversity of phenomena, but he is the first to acknowledge that they are far from having an absolute value. They must be taken for what they are worth, simply as methods of exposition, as approximations which are useful and convenient, though more or less imperfect.
We have no intention of writing a history of Egyptian industry. We refer those who require an account of it to the voluminous work of Sir Gardner Wilkinson, where they will find abundant details upon the trades of Egypt and the materials which they employed. We shall be content with selecting a few examples from the chief industries upon which the wealth of Egypt depended, in order to show how her artisans, like those of Greece, sought to give a certain amount of artistic value to every object that left their hands. Forms and motives which we have encountered in the higher branches of art are there again to be found. When civilization is in its first infancy, and the plastic instinct just struggling into life, it is from those handicrafts which may be called elementary or primitive that art borrows its first combinations of line and colour. But afterwards, when art has developed itself and created a style expressive of the national genius, the process is reversed, and the handicraftsman borrows in turn from the artist. In our modern society the use of machines and the division of labour have put a great gulf between the workman and the artist. Among the ancients it was very different. The workman was responsible for his work from inception to completion, and he expended upon it all the inventiveness, taste, and skill, that he possessed. He was not the slave of a machine turning out thousands of repetitions of a single object with inflexible regularity. Every day he introduced, almost without knowing it, some variation upon his work of the day before; his labour was a perpetual improvisation. Under such conditions it is difficult to say where the artist began and where the handicraftsman left off. In spite of the richness and subtlety of their idioms, the classic languages were unable to mark this distinction. In Greek, as in Latin, there was but a single term for two positions which seem to us by no means equal in dignity.
The potter's is, perhaps, the oldest of all the crafts. Among the relics of the cave-men and lake-dwellers of the West, the remains of rough pottery, shaped by the hand and dried either by the sun or in the neighbourhood of the domestic hearth, have been found. The Egypt of the earliest dynasties was already more advanced than this. The vases found in the mastabas show by their symmetrical shapes that the potter's wheel was already in use, and by their quality, that, although the Egyptians were content to dry their bricks in the sun, they fired their pottery in kilns and thoroughly understood the process.[362]
Egypt afforded an abundant supply of excellent potter's earth, and her inhabitants, like those of ancient Greece and Italy, employed terra-cotta for purposes to which we should now apply glass, wood, or metal. A good idea of the varied uses to which the material was put may be obtained from the early chapters of the work in which Dr. Birch has traced the history of ancient pottery, with the help of numerous illustrations.[363]
We shall not dwell upon common earthenware. It is represented by numerous vessels from the most ancient tombs in the Memphite necropolis; they are of a reddish or yellowish colour, and, in spite of the absence of all glaze, they hold water perfectly well. Like Greek vessels of the same kind they have sometimes three ears or handles (Fig. 291). Examples of coupled vessels, like those found in Cyprus, have also been discovered. They communicate with one another by a tube and are kept together by a common handle (Fig. 292). Of all the representative specimens of earthenware from the mastabas given by Lepsius, there is but one which does not seem to belong to the category of domestic pottery. It is a kind of aryballus, and is gracefully ornamented with interlacing circles.[364] In later times many of these unglazed vases were decorated with the brush, but they were not remitted to the oven after that operation.[365] The colour was therefore without lustre or solidity, and the designs were always very simple. To this group belong the vases shaped in the form of men, women, or animals, which are common enough in museums.[366] Sometimes a head, recalling that of the god Bes, is sketched in low relief upon a vase, and in a few instances a pair of small arms complete the fanciful design (Fig. 293).