The charming person who left us this statue is known, since the Exhibition of 1878, by the name of the Superintendent of the Cooks; his title in the inscription on the pedestal indicates a keeper of the wardrobe. In his lifetime he doubtless enjoyed some notoriety, since he had one of the fine tombs of Saqqarah for himself alone, but we know nothing of his history. His name was Khnoumhotpou, a name later made illustrious by a prince of Minieh under the XIIth Dynasty: his place of burial proves that he was born at the end of the Vth or beginning of the VIth Dynasty.

He was a dwarf, and a very small dwarf. The statue is scarcely a foot in height, and the dimensions of the head show that it was probably half the natural size. It reproduces the characteristics proper to dwarfs without exaggerating them. The head, of a suitable size, is long-shaped and flanked by two large ears. The expression of the face is heavy and stupid, the eyes narrow and raised at the temples, and the mouth wide and ill-formed. The chest is strong and well developed, but the artist has employed his ingenuity in vain in order to dissimulate the hind-quarters by covering them with a vast white petticoat; notwithstanding, we feel that the torso is not in proportion to the arms and legs. The stomach forms a round projection, and the hips recede in order to counterbalance the stomach. The thighs only exist in a rudimentary state, and the whole individual, mounted as he is on little deformed feet, seems about to fall face downwards on the ground. The flesh was painted red, the hair black, but the colour has peeled off or been effaced in places. The two legs were broken formerly at the ankle, then stuck on again when the statue was transported to the Museum. It is very possible that the accident happened during the execution of the statue, for the limestone used by the Egyptians is so fragile that the sculptor did not venture to detach the arms from the body: too hard a blow of the mallet while freeing the legs may have caused the unfortunate fracture that spoils the bottom of the monument.

Khnoumhotpou is, so far, the only dwarf that has come to light who is a nobleman. Similar dwarfs were not lacking in Egypt, but they nearly all belonged to the class of jugglers and buffoons. The Pharaohs and the princes of their court bestowed the same affection on these deformed creatures as did Christian or Mussulman kings in mediæval times; their household would not have been complete without two or three of them of an aspect more or less grotesque. Ti possessed one that figures by her in her tomb: the poor wretch holds in his right hand a kind of large wooden sceptre terminated by a model of a human hand, and leads a greyhound almost as tall as himself in a leash. Elsewhere dwarfs are represented crouching on a stool at the feet of their masters, by the side of the favourite monkey or dog. We know from the pictures of Beni-Hassan that two of them belonged to the prince of Minieh’s suite; one, despite his small size, does not lack elegance, but the other enjoys with the exiguity of his stature the pleasure of being club-footed. The Egyptian heaven did not escape the prevailing mania any more than the court of the Pharaohs, and it included several dwarfs, of whom two at least had an important rôle: Bîsa, who presided over arms and the toilet, and the Phtah, who for a long while has, without reason, been called embryonic Phtah.44 Perhaps Knoumhotpou joined to his functions of keeper of the wardrobe the office of court buffoon; perhaps he was of noble birth, and preserved by his origin from the disagreeables to which his brethren of low extraction were exposed.

But we have no need to know what he was: merely in leaving us his portrait, he has rendered signal service to science. Let us recall the part played by the statues of the tombs in the theological conceptions of the Egyptians: they were the indispensable support of the double, the body without which the soul of the dead person could not exist in the other world. It might be thought that in passing from life in this world to that beyond the tomb, the people to whom beauty had been chary might not have been sorry to assume a new appearance; if we are to be re-born, it is better to be re-born less ugly. The care that poor Khnoumhotpou has taken to reach us deformed shows that the old Egyptians did not hold our views on the subject: they desired to remain always as nature created them at the moment of conception. It was not absence of coquetry on their part, but necessity: their idea of the soul compelled them so to act. From the moment that their personality was indissolubly bound up with the existence of the body, the first condition imposed on them for remaining identical with themselves after death, as before, was to preserve their earthly form intact. In order that the Khnoumhotpou who dwelt in the hypogeum of Saqqarah might not be a different being from the Khnoumhotpou who walked through the streets of Memphis, it was necessary that his disincarnated double should find there the support of a statue of a dwarf. Give him the fine proportions of Ti or Rânofir, the proud bearing and haughty mien of the Cheîkh-el-Beled, even the more common type of the Crouching Scribe, he would not have known what to do. His substance, poured, so to speak, into the exiguous and deformed mould of the dwarf, could never have adapted itself to the new mould into which the artist would have tried to cast it. Khnoumhotpou beautified would no longer have been Khnoumhotpou; his tomb, without the statue of a dwarf, would only have sheltered a double and a support strangers to each other.

It was then the likeness, and the absolute likeness, that the artist had to seek to reproduce, and the seriousness and scrupulousness with which he rendered the deformity of his model is thus explained. The Egyptians were scoffers by nature, and liked to mingle the comic with the serious, not only in literature but in the arts. To take only one example: the painter who, at Thebes, pictured the interment of Nofrihotpou, has drawn, by the side of the large boats laden with mourners and all the apparatus of grief, the contortions of two sailors whose shallop was brutally struck by the oars of the funerary barque. If the sculptor who chiselled Khnoumhotpou had been free to follow his natural inclination, he would probably have exaggerated certain features and given the unfortunate creature a slightly absurd physiognomy. His religious conscience would not permit him to risk anything of the kind: a statue uglier than nature would have been as inconvenient to the soul of the original as a statue more beautiful than nature. A body of stone identical at all points with the body of flesh was what the Egyptian demanded, and that is exactly what the sculptor fashioned for the little Khnoumhotpou. We see here that what we call the question of art is subsidiary: a stone-cutter who understood his business sufficed for all that was required.

It must not, however, be concluded from what precedes that I regard the portrait of Khnoumhotpou as the work of a mere artisan. It has been too often repeated that statuary in Egypt was a mechanical craft; sculptors were taught to fashion arms, legs, heads, and torsos, and to join them, according to the formula, in imitation of two or three models always the same. That opinion, repeated by the Greeks, is fairly difficult to uphold in the presence of the statue of Knoumhotpou; it might be possible to set up patterns for bodies of ordinary formation, but all varieties of deformed bodies could not possibly be foreseen. The unknown master whose work we have at Boulaq proceeded in exactly the same manner as a modern sculptor, the necessities of whose work confronted him with a deformed model: he produced a work of art, not the task of a mechanic.