Fig. 11.—Plan of a part of the city at Tell-el-Amarna; from Prisse.
In the case of Thebes we cannot point out, even to this slight extent, the arrangement of the city. We cannot tell where the palaces of the king and the dwellings of the great were situated. All that we know is that the city properly speaking, the Diospolis of the Greeks, so called on account of the great temple of Amen which formed its centre, was on the right bank of the river; that its houses were massed round those two great sacred inclosures which we now call Karnak and Luxor; that it was intersected by wide streets, those which united Karnak and Luxor to each other and to the river being bordered with sphinxes. These great streets were the δρόμοι of the Greek writers; others they called βασιλική ῥύμη, king's street.[20] The blocks of houses which bordered these great causeways were intersected by narrow lanes.[21] The quarter on the left bank of the river was a sort of suburb inhabited chiefly by priests, embalmers, and others practising those lugubrious branches of industry which are connected with the burial of the dead.[22] The whole of this western city was known in the time of the Ptolemies and the Romans as the Memnonia.[23]
We shall not attempt to discuss the few hints given by the Greek writers as to the extent of Thebes. Even if they were less vague and contradictory than they are, they would tell us little as to the density of the population.[24] Diodorus says that there were once houses of four and five stories high at Thebes, but he did not see them himself, and it is to the time of the fabulous monarch Busiris that he attributes them.[25] In painted representations we never find a house of more than three stories, and they are very rare. As a rule we find a ground-floor, one floor above that, and a covered flat roof on the top.[26]
It does not seem likely that, even in the important streets, the houses of the rich made much architectural show on the outside. Thebes and Memphis probably resembled those modern Oriental towns in which the streets are bordered with massive structures in which hardly any openings beside the doors are to be seen. The houses figured in the bas-reliefs are often surrounded by a crenellated wall, and stand in the middle of a court or garden.[27]
Fig. 12.—Bird's-eye view of a villa, restored by Ch. Chipiez.
When a man was at all easy in his circumstances he chose for his dwelling a house in which all elegance and artistic elaboration was reserved for himself—a bare wall was turned to the noise of the street. Houses constructed upon such a principle covered, of course, a proportionally large space of ground. The walls of Babylon inclosed fields, gardens, and vineyards;[28] and it is probable that much of the land embraced by those of Thebes was occupied in similar fashion by those inclosures round the dwellings of the rich, which might be compared to an Anglo-Indian "compound."
The house, of which a restoration appears on page 31 (Fig. 12), a restoration which is based upon the plan found by Rosellini in a Theban tomb (Fig. 3), is generally considered to have been a country villa belonging to the king. We do not concur in that opinion, however. It appears to us quite possible that in the fashionable quarters—if we may use such a phrase—of Memphis and Thebes, the houses of the great may have shewn such combinations of architecture and garden as this. There are trees and creeping plants in front of the house shown in Fig. 1 also. Both are inclosed within a wall pierced by one large door.
Even the houses of the poor seem generally to have had their courtyards, at the back of which a structure was raised consisting of a single story surmounted by a flat roof, to which access was given by an external staircase. This arrangement, which is to be seen in a small model of a house which belongs to the Egyptian collection in the Louvre (Fig. 13), does not differ from that which is still in force in the villages of Egypt.[29]
In the larger houses the chambers were distributed around two or three sides of a court. The building, which has been alluded to as the Palace at Tell-el-Amarna, with many others in the same city (Figs. 14, 15, 16), affords an example of their arrangement. Sometimes, as in another and neighbouring house, the chambers opened upon a long corridor. The offices were upon the ground floor, while the family inhabited the stories above it. The flat top of the house had a parapet round it, and sometimes a light outer roof supported by slender columns of brilliantly painted wood. This open story is well shown in Fig. 1 and in a box for holding funerary statuettes, which is in the Louvre. It is reproduced in Fig. 18. Upon that part of the roof which was not covered a kind of screen of planks was fixed, which served to establish a current of air, and to ventilate the house (Fig. 19). Sometimes one part of a house was higher than the rest, forming a kind of tower (Fig. 20). Finally, some houses were crowned with a parapet finishing at the top in a row of rounded battlements (Fig. 21). In very large houses the entrance to the courtyard was ornamented with a porch supported by two pillars, with lotus flower capitals, to which banners were tied upon fête days (Fig. 22). Sometimes the name of the proprietor, sometimes a hospitable sentiment, was inscribed upon the lintel (Fig. 23).
Fig. 13.—Model of an Egyptian house; Louvre.
Figs. 14-17.—Plans of houses; from Wilkinson, vol. i. p. 345.
"Egyptian houses were built of crude bricks made of loam mixed with chopped straw. These bricks were usually a foot long and six inches wide. The ceilings of the larger rooms were of indigenous or foreign wood; the smaller rooms were often vaulted.
Fig. 18.—Piece of furniture in the form of a house; Louvre.
Fig. 19.—House from a Theban wall painting; from Wilkinson, i. p. 361.
Fig. 20.—House with a tower, from a painting; Wilkinson, i. p. 361.
"Doors and windows opened generally in the middle. They opened inwards, and were fastened by means of bolts and latches. Some of them had wooden locks like those which are still in use in Egypt. Most of the inner doors were closed merely by hangings of some light material. For the decoration we must turn to the pictures in the rock-cut tombs. The walls of the houses were coated with stucco, and painted with religious and domestic scenes. The galleries and columns of the porch were coloured in imitation of stone or granite. The ceilings were covered with what we call arabesques and interlacing ornaments of all kinds, while the floors were strewn with mats woven of many-coloured reeds."[30]
Fig. 21.—Battlemented house; from Wilkinson, i. p. 362.
Fig. 22.—Decorated porch; from Wilkinson, i. p. 346.
Fig. 23.—House with inscription; from Wilkinson, i. 32.
Fig. 24.—House, storehouse, and garden; from Prisse, p. 218.
We shall describe the tasteful and convenient furniture which these rooms contained in our chapter upon the industrial arts.
The flat roof seems to have been universal in Egypt. It added to the accommodation of the house, it afforded a pleasant rendezvous for the family in the evening, where they could enjoy the view and the fresh breezes which spring up at sunset. At certain seasons they must have slept there.[31] On the other hand the granaries, barns, and storehouses were almost always dome-shaped (Fig. 24). Those which had flat roofs seem to have been very few indeed. This we see in a painting which seems to represent the process of brewing. The Egyptians were great beer drinkers (Fig. 25). These brick vaults must have been very thick, and they were well fitted to preserve that equable and comparatively low temperature which is required for the keeping of provisions. The bas-reliefs often show long rows of storehouses one after the other. Their number was no doubt intended to give an idea of their proprietor's wealth. Some of them seem to have had their only opening half-way up their sides and to have been reached by an external incline or flight of steps (Fig. 26). A sketch made by M. Bourgoin in a tomb at Sakkarah shows us another form of granary. It (Fig. 27) is shaped like a stone bottle, it has a door at the ground level and a little window higher up.[32]
Fig. 25.—Brewing, Beni-Hassan; from Champollion, pl. 398.
Fig. 26.—Granaries, Beni-Hassan; from Wilkinson.
Fig. 27.—Granaries; Sakkarah.
The Egyptians had country houses as well as those in town, but the structural arrangements were the same in both. The dwelling of the peasant did not differ very greatly from that of the town-bred artisan, while the villas of the wealthy were only distinguished from their houses in the richer quarters of Thebes and Memphis by their more abundant provision of shady groves, parks, and artificial lakes. Their paintings prove conclusively that the Egyptians had carried horticulture to a very high pitch; they even put their more precious trees in pots like those in which we place orange-trees.[33]
The Ancient Egyptians have left us very few works of military architecture, and yet, under their great Theban princes, more than one fortress must have been built outside their own country to preserve their supremacy over neighbouring peoples. In the later periods of the empire fortresses were erected in the Delta and in the upper gorges of the Nile, but, unfortunately such works were always carried out in brick and generally in crude brick. The Egyptian architect had at hand in great abundance the finest materials in the world, except marble, and yet they were used by him exclusively for the tomb and the temple. When it was a question of providing an indestructible dwelling for the dead, and so of perpetuating the efficacy of the funeral prayers and offerings, "eternal stone" was not spared; but when less important purposes had to be fulfilled they were content with clay. Baking bricks was a more rapid process than quarrying and dressing stone, and if the house or fortress in which they were used had comparatively slight durability, it was easy enough to replace it with another.
Th crude bricks, dried simply in the sun, became disintegrated with time and fell into powder; the kiln dried bricks were carried off from the ruins of one building to be used in another. The few piers or fragments of wall which remain are confused and shapeless. A few blocks of stone, sometimes even a single chip of marble, is enough to enable us to tell the history of a building which has been long destroyed. Such a chip may be the only surviving fragment of the edifice to which it belonged, but it preserves the impression of the chisel which fashioned it, that is of the taste and individuality of the artist who held the chisel. We have nothing of the kind in the case of a brick. Bricks were almost always covered with a coat of stucco, so that nothing was required of them beyond that they should be of the right size and of a certain hardness. It is only by their inscriptions, when they have them, that the dates of these bricks can be determined; when they are without them they tell us nothing at all about the past. Sometimes a brick structure presents, from a distance, an imposing appearance, and the traveller approaches it thinking that he will soon draw all its secrets from it. But after carefully studying and measuring it he is forced to confess that he has failed. It has no trace of decoration, and it is the decoration of an ancient building which tells us its age, its character, and its purpose. Stone, even when greatly broken, allows mouldings to be traced, but bricks preserve nothing; they are as wanting in individual expression as the pebbles which go to make a shingly beech.
Even if it had come down to us in a less fragmentary condition, the military architecture of Egypt would have been far less interesting than that of Greece. The latter country is mountainous; the soil is cut up by valleys and rocky hills; the Greek towns, or, at least, their citadels, occupied the summits of rocky heights which varied greatly in profile and altitude. Hence the military architecture of the country showed great diversity in its combinations. In Egypt the configuration of the soil was not of a nature to provoke any efforts of invention or adaptation. All the cities were in the plain. Fortified posts were distinguished from one another only by the greater or less extent, height, and thickness of their walls. We shall, however, have to call attention to the remains of a few defensive works which, like those established to guard the defiles of the cataracts, were built upon sites different enough from those ordinarily presented by the Nile valley. In these cases we shall find that the Egyptian constructors knew how to adapt their military buildings to the special requirements of the ground.
Egyptian cities seem always to have been surrounded by a fortified enceinte; in some cases the remains of such fortifications have been found, in others history tells us that they existed. At Thebes, for instance, no traces have, so far as we know, been discovered of any wall. Homer's epithet of hundred-gated (ἑκατόμπυλος) may be put on one side as evidence, because the Greek poet did not know Egypt. He described the great metropolis of the Empire of the South as he imagined it to be. The Homeric epithet is capable also of another explanation, an explanation which did not escape Diodorus,[34] it may have referred, not to the gates of the city, but to the pylons of the temples, and should in that case be translated as "Thebes of the hundred pylons" instead of hundred gates. We have better evidence as to the existence of fortifications about the town in the descriptions left to us by the ancient historians of the siege of Ptolemy Physcon: the city could not have resisted for several years if it had been an open town. It was the same with Memphis. On more than one occasion, during the Pharaonic period as well as after the Persian conquest, it played the part of a fortress of the first class. It was the key of middle Egypt. It even had a kind of citadel which included almost a third of the city and was called the white wall (λευκὸν τεῖχος).[35] This name was given, as the scholiast to Thucydides informs us, "because its walls were of white stone, while those of the city itself were of red brick." The exactness of this statement may be doubted. The Egyptians made their defensive walls of a thickness which could only be attained in brick. It seems likely therefore that these walls consisted of a brick core covered with white stone. An examination of the remains of Heliopolis suggested to the authors of the Description de l'Égypte that the walls of that city also were cased with dressed stone. They found, even upon the highest part of the walls, pieces of limestone for which they could account in no other way.
Nowhere else is there anything to be discovered beyond the remains of brick walls, which have always been laid out in the form of a parallelogram.[36] These walls are sometimes between sixty and seventy feet thick.[37] In some cases their position is only to be traced by a gentle swelling in the soil; at Sais, however, they seem to have preserved a height of fifty-seven feet in some parts.[38] No signs of towers or bastions are ever found. At Heliopolis there were gates at certain distances with stone jambs covered with inscriptions.[39] The best preserved of all these enceintes is that of the ancient city of Nekheb, the Eilithyia of the Greeks, in the valley of El-Kab. The rectangle is 595 yards long by 516 wide; the walls are 36 feet-thick.[40] About a quarter of the whole enceinte has been destroyed for the purposes of agriculture; the part which remains contains four large gates, which are not placed in the middle of the faces upon which they open. In all the paintings representing sieges these walls are shown with round-topped battlements, which were easily constructed in brick.
The only fort, properly speaking, which has been discovered in Egypt, appears to be the ruin known as Chounet-es-Zezib at Abydos.[41] This is a rectangular court inclosed by a double wall, and it still exists in a fair state of preservation, to the west of the northern necropolis (Fig. 28). After examining many possible hypotheses, Mariette came to the conclusion that this was a military post intended to watch over the safety of the necropolis, and to keep an eye upon the caravans arriving from the desert. Robber tribes might otherwise be tempted to make use of any moment of confusion for the pillage of the temple. There were curious arrangements for the purpose of guarding against a coup-de-main. Within the outer wall, which is provided with small gateways, there is a covered way extending round the whole fort, and commanded by the inner wall. Before the inner court could be reached, an enemy had to traverse a narrow and crooked passage in the thickness of the wall, which was well calculated to secure the necessary time for a moment of preparation in case of surprise (Fig. 29).
Fig. 28.—Military post at Abydos; perspective from the plans, etc., of Mariette.
Fig. 29.—Military post. Plan of the entrances; from Mariette.
The most curious relic of the military engineering of the Egyptians is to be found in Nubia. Thirty-seven miles south-ward of the cataracts of Wadi-Halfah the Nile has worn a channel through a long chain of granite hills which run across the valley from east to west. On each side of the river-bed these hills rise to some height and across its torrent there are a few detached rocks, which once formed a natural dam, but between which the water now rushes impetuously. Navigation is only possible among these rapids during the inundation. This point in the river's course was therefore well fitted to be the gate of Egypt and to be fortified against the incursions of the southern tribes. During the first Theban Empire, the Pharaohs of the twelfth dynasty drew the national frontier at this point, and resolved to establish themselves there in force. The Third Ousourtesen seems to have built the two fortresses of which substantial remains exist even now. Each fortress contained a temple and numerous houses. Lepsius gives the name of Kummeh to that on the right bank and reserves the name Semneh, which has usually been applied to the whole group, to the building on the left bank only.
Fig. 30.—Bird's-eye view of the fortress of Semneh; restored by Charles Chipiez.
For our restoration (Fig. 30) we have had to depend very little upon conjecture.[42] The only flight of fancy in which we have indulged is seen in the extra height which we have given to the tower at the north-eastern angle of the building. It seemed to us probable that at some point upon such a lofty terrace there would be a belvedere or watch-tower to facilitate the proper surveillance of the country round about. For the rest we have merely re-established the upper part of the works and restored its depth to the ditch, which had been filled in by the falling of the parapets. The line of walls and bastions can be easily followed except at one point upon the southern face, where a wide breach exists. The destruction of this part of the wall alone and the clearing of the ground upon which it stood, suggests that it was broken down by man rather than by time. It is probable that the fortress was taken by some Ethiopian conqueror, by Sabaco or Tahraka, and that he took care to render its fortifications useless in a way that could not be easily repaired.
Our view of the fort shows it as it must have appeared from a hill in the Libyan Chain, to the south-west. The engineer lavished all his skill on rendering the castle impregnable from the side of the desert. An attack upon the flank facing the stream was impossible; on that side the walls rested upon precipitous rocks rising sheer from the rapids of the Nile.
The trace of the walls was a polygon not unlike a capital L. The principal arm was perpendicular to the course of the river. Its flat summit (see Fig. 30) was about 250 feet by 190 feet. The interior was reached by a narrow passage in the thickness of the masonry, the entrance to which was reached by an inclined plane. The entrance is not visible in our illustration but the incline which leads to it is shown. The walls on the three sides which looked landwards were from fifty to eighty feet high, according to the ground. They increased in thickness from twenty-six feet at the base to about twelve or thirteen at the summit. Externally their upper parts fell backwards in such fashion that no ladder, however high, would have availed to reach the parapet. We find a similar arrangement in the walls of a fortress represented at Beni-Hassan (Fig. 31).[43]
Fig. 31.—A besieged fort, Beni-Hassan; from Champollion, pl. 379.
The walls of Semneh were strengthened, both structurally and from a military point of view, by salient buttresses or small bastions on all the sides except that which faced the river. These buttresses were either twelve or thirteen in number and from six to eight feet wide at the top. In the re-entering angle which faces north-west there is a long diagonal buttress, by the use of which the engineer or architect at once economized material and protected a weak part of his structure in a most efficient manner. The salient angles of the enceinte were protected by double towers, very well disposed so as to command the ditch. A symmetrical regularity is not to be found here any more than in the funerary and religious structures of Egypt. The curtain wall between two of the towers on the southern face is broken up into small buttresses of various degrees of salience, instead of being planned on a straight line like the rest.
Fig. 32.—Siege of a fortress; from the Ramesseum, Thebes.
When the fortress was prepared for defence the parapets may have been furnished with wooden structures acting as machicolations, whence the besieged could cast javelins and stones and shoot arrows at an enemy attempting to scale or batter the walls. A bas-relief at Thebes which represents the siege of a fortress seems to indicate that the parapets were crowned by wooden erections of some kind (Fig. 32).[44]
The walls were surrounded by a ditch, which was from 95 to 125 feet wide. We cannot now tell what its depth may have been, but it appears to have been paved. The counterscarp and certain parts of the scarp were faced with stone, carefully polished, and fixed so as to augment the difficulty of approach. Moreover, the crown of the glacis and the wide glacis itself were also reveted with stone. All this formed a first line of defence, which had to be destroyed before the assailants could reach the place itself with their machines. The external line of the ditch does not follow all the irregularities of the enceinte, its trace is the same as that of the curtain wall, exclusive of the towers or buttresses. The clear width from the face of the latter is about sixty-four feet. Neither ditch nor glacis exist on the eastern face, where the rapids of the Nile render them unnecessary.
We must not forget to draw attention to the curious way in which the body of the fort is constructed. It is composed of crude bricks transfixed horizontally, and at rather narrow intervals, by pieces of wood. The situation of these beams may be easily recognized as they have decayed and left channels in the brickwork. That the holes with which the walls are pierced at regular distances (see Fig. 30) were thus caused, is beyond doubt, especially since a few fragments of wood which the centuries have spared have been found. These fragments have been recognized as having come from the doum palm, which is very common in Upper Egypt, and commoner still in Nubia.
We need not dwell upon the other fortress—that on the right bank. It may be seen in the distance in our restoration of Semneh. Being built upon rocks which were on all sides difficult of access, it did not require any very elaborate works. It was composed of an enceinte inclosing an irregular square about 190 feet each way. It had but a few salient buttresses; there were only two on the north-east, towards the mountains, and one, a very bold one, on the south-west, commanding the river. There was no room for a wide ditch. But at a distance of thirteen feet from the walls there was a glacis similar to that at Semneh. It had the same casing of polished stone, but on account of the irregularities of the rock, the height of its crown varied considerably, and its slope was very steep, almost vertical. The trace of the counterscarp followed that of the enceinte, including the buttresses. Moreover, at its northern and southern angles it followed a line which roughly resembled the bastions of a modern fortification. Its structure was similar to that of Semneh.
Lepsius does not hesitate to ascribe both these forts to Ousourtesen III., whose name appears upon all the neighbouring rocks, and who, with the deities of the south, was worshipped at Semneh.[45] They would thus date back, according to the chronology which is now generally adopted, to the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth century B.C. In any case they cannot be later than the time of Thothmes III., who, in the course of the seventeenth century B.C. restored the temples which they inclose, and covered their walls with his effigies and royal cartouches. Even if we admit that these two castles are not older than the last-named epoch, we shall still have to give to Egypt the credit of possessing the oldest examples of military architecture, as well as the oldest temples and the oldest tombs.
METHODS OF CONSTRUCTION, THE ORDERS, SECONDARY FORMS.
We have now described the tomb, the temple, and the house in ancient Egypt. We have attempted to define the character of their architecture, and to show how its forms were determined by the religious beliefs, social condition, and manners of the nation, as well as by the climate of the country. We have therefore passed in review the most important architectural creations of a people who were the first to display a real taste and feeling for art.
In order to give a complete idea of Egyptian art, and of the resources at its disposal, we must now take these buildings to pieces and show the elements of which they were composed. The rich variety of supports, the numerous "orders" of pillar and column, the methods employed for decoration and illumination, must each be studied separately. We have commenced by looking at them from a synthetic point of view, but we must finish by a methodical analysis. From such an analysis alone can we obtain the necessary materials for an exhaustive comparison between the art of Egypt and that of the nations which succeeded her upon the stage of history. An examination of the Egyptian remains carries the historian back to a more remote date than can be attained in the case of any other country, and yet he is far from reaching the first springs of Egyptian civilization. Notwithstanding their prodigious antiquity, the most ancient of the monuments that have survived carry us back into the bosom of a society which had long emerged from primitive barbarism. The centuries which saw the building of the Pyramids and the mastabas of the Memphite necropolis had behind them a long and well-filled past. Although we possess no relic from that past, we can divine its character to some extent from the impression which it made upon the taste and fancy of latter ages. Certain effects of which the artists of Memphis were very fond can only be explained by habits contracted during a long course of centuries. In the forms and motives employed by Egyptian architects we shall find more than one example of these survivals from a previous stage of development, such as forms appropriate to wood or metal employed in stone, and childish methods of construction perpetuated without other apparent cause.
In our explanation of the general character of Egyptian architecture we have already enumerated the principal materials of which it disposed, and pointed out the modifications arising from the choice of one or another of those materials. We should not here return to the subject but for a misconception which has gained a wide acceptance.
People have seen a few granite obelisks standing in two or three of the European capitals, and they have too often jumped to the conclusion that the Egyptians built almost exclusively in granite. The fact is that there is but one building in Egypt the body of which is of granite, and that is the ancient temple at Gizeh which is called the Temple of the Sphinx (Figs. 202 and 203, vol. i.). Even there the roof and the casing of the walls was of alabaster. Granite was employed, as a rule, only where a very choice and expensive material was required. It was brought into play when certain parts of a building had to be endowed with more nobility and beauty than the rest. Thus there are, in the great temple at Karnak, a few small rooms, called The Granite Chambers (Fig. 215, H, vol. i.), in which the material in question has alone been employed. Elsewhere in the same building it was only used incidentally. In the pyramid of Cheops the lining of the Grand Gallery is of granite.[46] In many of the Theban temples it was employed for the bases of columns, thresholds, jambs, and lintels of doors. It was also used for isolated objects, such as tabernacles, monolithic statues, obelisks, and sarcophagi. The enormous quantity of granite which Egypt drew, from first to last, from the quarries at Syene, was mostly for the sculptor. The dressed materials of the architect came chiefly from the limestone and sandstone quarries. Sometimes we find a building entirely constructed of one or the other, sometimes they are employed side by side. "The great temple at Abydos is built partly of limestone, very fine in the grain and admirably adapted for sculpture, and partly of sandstone. The sandstone has been used for columns, architraves, and the frames of doors, and limestone for the rest."[47]
Bricks were employed to a vast extent by the Egyptians. They made them of Nile mud mixed with chopped straw, a combination which is mentioned in the Biblical account of the hardships inflicted upon the Israelites. "And Pharaoh commanded the same day the taskmasters of the people and their officers, saying, Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick as heretofore; let them go and gather straw for themselves. And the tale of the bricks which they did make heretofore ye shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish aught thereof, for they be idle."[48]
This manufacture was remarkable for its extreme rapidity—an excellent brick earth was to be found at almost any point in the Nile valley. An unpractised labourer can easily make a thousand bricks a day; after a week's practice he can make twelve hundred, and, if paid "by the piece" as many as eighteen hundred a day.[49] Sometimes drying in the sun was thought sufficient; the result was a crude brick which was endowed with no little power of resistance and endurance in such a climate as that of Egypt. When baked bricks were required the operation was a little complicated as they each had to pass through the kiln. Egyptian bricks were usually very large. Those of a pyramid in the neighbourhood of Memphis average 15 inches long by 7 wide and 4-3/4 inches thick.[50] After the commencement of the Theban epoch they were often stamped with the royal oval—as the Roman bricks had the names of the consuls impressed upon them—and thus they have preserved the dates at which the buildings of which they form part were erected (Fig. 33).[51]
Fig. 33.—Brick stamped with the royal ovals; from Prisse.
We see, then, that the Egyptians had no lack of excellent building materials of a lapidary kind. On the other hand, they were very poorly provided with good timber. Before the conquest of Syria they must have been almost entirely confined to their indigenous woods. The best of these were the Acacia nilotica, or gum acacia, and the Acacia lebhak, but neither of these trees furnished beams of any size. Sycamore wood was too soft; its root alone being hard enough for use.[52] And yet in default of better wood it was sometimes employed. The same may be said of the date palm, whose trunk furnished posts and rafters, and, at times, very poor flooring planks. During the hey-day of Theban supremacy, the timber for such buildings as the pavilion at Medinet-Abou must have been brought from Syria at great cost. The Theban princes, like those of Nineveh in later times, no doubt caused the Phœnicians, who were their vassals, to thin the cedar forests of Lebanon for their benefit. In structures of less importance carpenters and joiners had to do as best they could with the timber furnished by their own country. The difficulty which they experienced in procuring good planks explains to some extent the care which they lavished upon their woodwork. They contrived, by an elaborate system of "parquetting," of combining upright and horizontal strips with ornamental members, to avoid the waste of even the smallest piece of material. In some ways this work resembles the ceilings, doorways, and panels of a modern Arab house, of the moucharabiehs of Cairo. The principle is the same in both cases, although the decorative lines are somewhat different; similar necessities have suggested the employment of similar processes.[53]
In spite of the bad quality of Egyptian timber the earliest efforts at construction made by the ancestors of the people were made in wood. Their dwellings cannot have been very unlike those which the traveller even yet encounters in Nubia. These are cabins with walls formed of palm branches interlaced and plastered over with clay and straw. Their roofs are branches or planks from the same tree laid horizontally across. In Lower Egypt, upon the borders of Lake Menzaleh, the huts of the people are formed of long and thick faggots of reeds. Wherever wood was abundant and the rain less to be feared than the heat of the sun, the first dwelling was a hut of branches. The manufacture of bricks required a good deal more patience, calculation, and effort, than to plant a few boughs in the soil and weave them together.
We do not mean to pretend that earth, either in the form of bricks or pisé, did not very soon come into use when men began to form shelters for themselves, but it seems certain that wooden construction was developed before any other. It was the first to aim at ornament, and to show anything which could be called a style. This is proved by the fact that the most ancient works in stone have no appropriate character of their own; they owe such decorative qualities as they possess to their docile imitation of works in the less durable material.
We may take the sarcophagus of Mycerinus as an example of this. That sarcophagus had a short but adventurous career after its discovery by Colonel Howard Vyse in 1837. It was then empty, but in a state of perfect preservation, with the exception of the lid, which was broken, but could be easily restored. The precious relic was removed from the pyramid and embarked, together with the wooden coffin of the king, on board a merchant ship at Alexandria. On her voyage to England the ship was wrecked off Carthagena, and the sarcophagus lost. The coffin floated and was saved. Happily the sarcophagus had been accurately drawn, and we are enabled to give a perspective view of it compiled from Perring's elevations (Fig. 34).
From its appearance no one would guess that this sarcophagus was of basalt. The whole of its forms were appropriate to wooden construction alone. Each of its longer sides was divided into three compartments by four groups of minute pilasters, slight in salience, and crowned by a kind of entablature formed of four transverse members which were unequal in length and relief. The lower parts of the three compartments consist of a kind of false door with very complicated jambs. Above this there are deeply cut hollows with cross bars, suggesting windows, and still higher a number of fillets run along the whole length of the sarcophagus. The little pilasters are separated by narrow panels, which terminate in an ornament which could readily be cut in wood by the chisel, viz., in that double lotus-leaf which is so universally present in the more ancient tombs.
The ends of the sarcophagus were similar to the sides, except that they had only one compartment. The corners and the upper edge, exclusive of the lid, are carved into a cylindrical moulding which resembles the rounded and tied angles of a wooden case. The upper member of the whole, a bold cornice, is the only element which it is not easy to refer to the traditions of wooden construction.[54]
The first idea suggested by the design of this sarcophagus is that of a large wooden coffer. When we come to look at it a little more closely, however, the imitations of doors and windows and other details incline us to believe that its maker was thinking of reproducing the accustomed aspect of a wooden house. In that case we should have in it a reduction of a building belonging to the closed category of assembled constructions. It is by the study of imitative works of this kind and by comparing with one another the forms originally conceived by carpenters and joiners, and afterwards employed in stone architecture, that, in our chapter upon the general principles of Egyptian construction, we were enabled to attempt a restoration which may be taken as a type of the early wooden architecture (Fig. 83, vol. i.).