Among the principal objects discovered by Theodore Davis in 1907 in the Valley of the Kings, in the secret chamber where the heretic Pharaoh Khouniatonou was buried with an equipment partly consisting of objects that had belonged to his mother, Tîyi, there are four alabaster Canopic jars of a rare perfection even for that period of perfect execution. The body of the jar is a little longer than is usual, slender at the base, bulging out at the top, with a polish at once unobtrusive and pleasing to the eye. An inscription had been engraved on it, and so far as may be judged by the place it occupied, was the ordinary dedication to the deities protecting the entrails; but it has been effaced, then the place smoothed over, and tinted with the colour of the surrounding part. The touching up is accomplished with so much skill that we can only here and there, beneath the transparence of the glazing, guess at a few marks of the old writing. The four lids are in the form of a human head, a very refined head framed in the short wig with close rows of little flat locks of hair: a golden uræus, now vanished, stood on the forehead. As the face is beardless, and the whole of the equipment except the coffin bears the name of Tîyi, the Canopic jars have been attributed to the queen. I do not share that opinion; I maintain that they belonged to the Pharaoh, and that we should see his authentic portrait in them.

No one who has seen the four heads side by side will doubt that they represent one and the same person. The insignificant differences to be noticed between them are caused by unimportant technical details, or by breakages in the stone, or by the action of damp, or the different way in which time has treated the materials of which the eyes were formed. The eyebrows consist of a fillet of blue enamel encrusted on the edge of the arch, and the eye, properly so-called, is also designated by a blue fillet, which includes a cornea in white limestone, relieved with red at the corners, and an iris of black stone. In some, the eyebrow is gone. In others the iris has fallen, leaving blind one or both the eyes, or, the whole having been displaced, the eye has been brought forward as if the person was suffering from the beginning of an exophthalmic goître. Very different expressions of countenance are the result, but under them all the same face is quickly recognized: a longish oval, rather thin at the bottom, a somewhat narrow forehead, a straight nose, thin where it joins the face and turned up at the end almost like Roxelana’s, delicate wide-opened nostrils, the sides thin and nervous, a short upper lip, a small but full mouth, a bony chin, pointed and heavy, joined to the neck by a rather harsh line. None of the heads have been entirely respected by time, and one of them has lost its nose, but by good luck, rare in archæology, the best in composition is also that which has suffered least: if the enamel of the eyelids is wanting, the eyes are intact and the epidermis without scratches. I do not think that there exists in the Egyptian sculpture of that period a more energetic or living physiognomy: the mouth is closed as if to retain the words that desire to escape, the nostrils are inflated and palpitate, the eyes look keenly and frankly into those of the visitor. With age, the alabaster has taken on the dull complexion of the great Egyptian ladies, always protected by the veil, which the sun can never burn. So that it is not surprising that many should have felt in looking at them that they were heads of a woman, and, knowing the circumstances of the discovery, imagined that they saw the most celebrated woman there had then been in the Egyptian Empire, the queen-dowager Tîyi.

Strictly speaking, that is quite possible, for on the one hand the head-dress and necklace into which the neck fits are common to both sexes, and on the other, the features, more accentuated than is usual with a woman, are not so to the point of only fitting a man; directly, however, they are compared with those of the portraits of Tîyi, we are bound to confess that the resemblance is slight. Two types of these have come down to us. In the first, which is by far the most frequent, her face was remodelled and symbolized in the studios of Thebes in accordance with the customary formula for queens. The colossal group of Medinet Habou, recently transported to the Cairo Museum, offers, perhaps, the best example. There, following the regulations, Tîyi is furnished with a round, regular face, almond-shaped eyes, good cheeks, straight nose, smiling mouth, and normal chin: there is something about her which prevents us from confusing her with the other princesses of her era, but she has preserved none of the peculiarities that compose her actual physiognomy. That is no longer the case with the most individual of the specimens of the second type, the soapstone head that Petrie discovered at Sinaï, which is now in the Cairo Museum. The right wing of the wig is wanting, and the nose has been crushed by an unfortunate blow on the left nostril, without, however, losing anything of its essential form; a cartouche engraved on the front of the head-dress tells us the name, and at the first glance the portrait gives the impression of a good likeness. It is not flattering. If we are to believe it, Tîyi presented the racial characteristics of the Berbers or of the women of the Egyptian desert: small eyes puckered at the temples, a nose with a broad tip and contemptuous nostrils, a heavy, sulky mouth with turned-down corners, the lower lip dragged back by a receding chin like that of a semi-negress: the receding chin alone forbids us to identify her with the original of our Canopic jars. They have certainly a family likeness, and it could not be otherwise, for if I am right it is a question of mother and son, but variations are to be noted in the son which remove him from the type so clearly revealed in Petrie’s statuette. That type, on the contrary, is preserved intact in the admirable head in painted wood which has passed into the collection of Herr Simon of Berlin. We might even say that it is exaggerated, and that the eyes are more oblique, the cheek-bones more prominent, the nose more aggressive, the smiling muscles more sharply evident, the mouth and chin closer to that of a negress. I believe it to be one of Tîyi’s granddaughters who became queen after the fall of the Heretic Dynasty: her head-dress, which was originally that of a private person, was afterwards modified to receive the insignia of royalty. Was she married to Harmhâbi, to Ramses, or to Setouî I? The deviation between the group to which she belongs and that of the Canopic jars is sufficiently great to force us to give up the idea that they represent one person. In addition, our Canopic sculptures possess only one uræus on the forehead, as is customary with kings, while the others have the double uræus which then begins to be the etiquette with queens. That rule has exceptions, and therefore I shall not deduce too strict conclusions from it: but the absence of the second uræus is not less a somewhat strong presumption in favour of the opinion that our Canopic heads are those of a man and not of a woman.

If, however, they are portraits of a man, the circumstances of their discovery compel us to declare that he must be the king Khouniatonou; but how are we to be convinced of this when we remember the grotesque silhouette that the sculptors of El-Amarna have given him? To believe them, he would have been physically a sort of degenerate, tall, weakly, with hips and chest like a woman’s, a neck without consistency, an absurd head, a flat, almost non-existent forehead, an enormous nose, an ugly mouth, a massive chin.62 He seems to have liked these caricatures, and his friends, imitating him from a desire to flatter him, altered more or less the shape of their own bodies in order that they might resemble that of his. Documents of different origins prove, however, that he was not, or had not always been, the queer figure that is attributed to him. The Louvre alone possesses two such witnesses. The first, which came to the Museum in its early days, is a charming statuette in yellow soapstone. The king is seated, but he has lost the bottom of the legs, which a modern restorer has skilfully replaced. He wears the coufeh with hanging ends, the bust is bare; in his right hand he holds the hooked staff and the sacred whip emblems of royalty; the left hand is indolently stretched over the thigh. The body is young, the muscling supple and thick, and although he sinks down a little, he has not the squat attitude we know so well. The face and neck are somewhat slender, and contain the characteristics that, exaggerated later, lent themselves almost naturally to caricature. It is, in fact, the effigy of the young king sculptured at Thebes at the time when he was only Amenôphis IV, but when he demanded that he should be represented as he was, or as he saw himself, without reference to the conventional type of the Pharaoh. In the second piece, a statue of which only the head and shoulders remain, he is some years older. He is armed for war, and his neck, too slender, has bent under the weight of the helmet, as if thenceforth incapable of supporting it. It is the profile of the bas-reliefs of El-Amarna with the rounded spine and the particular curve that projects the head forward; the forehead, nose and mouth only differ from those of the statuette in that they are thinner. A plaster mask in the Cairo Museum which Petrie considers to have been moulded on the corpse immediately after the sovereign’s death, but which is undoubtedly a studio model, testifies to a condition of physiological degeneracy that did not before exist. It presents the emaciated features of the bas-reliefs and their bony texture, it is true, but without their extreme exaggerations. When it was question of a statue, the sculptor forbade himself the liberties that his colleagues, commissioned to decorate the tombs, allowed themselves with the master: he represented him just as he was at the moment, and the physiognomy was sufficiently original for him to be certain of always deriving from it a work that would force the attention of the spectators.

And now let us compare each of these pieces with our Canopic heads. The profile of Khouniatonou helmeted is not as strong as theirs, due perhaps to the contusions undergone by the surface of the stone during a long sojourn in a damp soil where saltpetre was abundant, but each of the elements may be superposed and adjusted, forehead, nose, eyes, mouth, chin, in an absolutely satisfying manner: it merely seems that the artist of the Canopic heads saw his model in better health than that of the statue. The resemblance, although less complete, with the statuette of yellow soapstone is still apparent. No unprejudiced observer with the series in front of him can come to any other conclusion than that we have in it portraits of one and the same man. Leaving out the slight differences due to the chisel, there is no more deviation between the group of statues and the best of our heads than there is between that and the three found with it. There is divergence in one point only: in the two statues the head bends and leans forward more or less; in the Canopic jars it is erect without weakness. A moment’s reflection will show that it could not be otherwise. However greatly we are moved by the beauty of the work, we must not forget that our four heads belong, not to art pure and simple, but to industrial art, and that their purpose imposed special rules on the master who chiselled them. They were prosaic lids for the receptacles in which the entrails of the Pharaoh were placed, and it was necessary that the median axis of the vase properly so-called should coincide exactly with that of the lid. There was a question of equilibrium to be managed between the two constituent elements of the Canopic jar; the sculptor must straighten the neck of his model, and consequently correct the impression of lassitude given by the statues, by an appearance of vigour. If we examine the portraits of Khouniatonou and his successors in company of a physician, certain anatomical details that at the first glance we did not trouble about—the depression of the temples, the obliquity of the eyes, the contraction of the sides of the nostrils, the pinching of the mouth, the attenuation of the neck—assume an etiological value that the archæologist was far from suspecting. Dr. Baÿ, studying the faces of Khouniatonou, Touatânkhamânou, and Harmhâbi with me, diagnosed symptoms of consumption more or less advanced. If Khouniatonou died of the disease when thirty years old, we need not be greatly surprised.

I do not insist upon this kind of research, in which I am not competent, and I leave it to the reader to decide if I have or have not proved the identity of the person represented by our four heads to be that of Khouniatonou, the heresiarch. One of them at least is a masterpiece, and the others possess qualities that assure them a high place in the estimation of connoisseurs, but to which of the great Egyptian schools ought we to attribute them? We may hesitate between two: the Theban, to which most of the artists who filled the royal laboratories then belonged, and the Hermopolitan, in the province of which was El-Amarna, the favourite residence of the sovereign. It was certainly the latter school that worked at the hypogeums and sculptured the pictures. We find in them its defects: harsh, rough composition, a tendency to caricature the human form and to multiply comic episodes; but also its good qualities: suppleness, movement, life, freedom of execution. The few figures in alto-relievo that have escaped destruction, those, for instance, that accompany two of the large front stelæ, are of the same style as the bas-reliefs, but we do not find in them any of the characteristics that we have noted as proper to the monuments of the Louvre or to our Canopic jars. Just as the others show an unfinished, worn aspect, these are carefully finished in the least details: it is the perfect chiselling and high polish of the Theban masters and their strong, dignified way of posing the figure and expressing the physiognomy of the model. Whoever has seen the statues of Thoutmôsis III, Amenôthes II, the so-called Taîa, and Touatânkhamânou in the Cairo Museum will not doubt for a moment that our four heads are from the hands of persons belonging to the same school: they belong to the Theban school, and more particularly, I think, to that portion of the Theban school which, a few years later, decorated the temple of Gournah, the Memnonium of Abydos, and the hypogeum of Setouî I.