The three little wooden figures reproduced here are of Theban origin, and represent persons who lived under the conqueror-kings of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties.

The first was found in the Salt collection, purchased by Champollion at Leghorn in 1825, which forms the basis of the Louvre collection.77 It is a young woman in a long clinging dress trimmed with a band of embroidery in white thread running from top to bottom. She wears a gold necklace of three rows and gold bracelets. On her head is a wig, the hair of which hangs down to the rise of the breast; the wig is kept in place by a large gilded band simulating a crown of leaves arranged points downwards. The right arm hangs down beside the body, and the hand held an object, probably in metal, which has disappeared; the left arm is folded across the chest, and the hand clasps the stem of a lotus, the bud pointing between the breasts. The body is supple and well-formed, the breast young, straight, slight, the face broad, and smiling with something of softness and vulgarity. The artist was unable to avoid heaviness in the arrangement of the coiffure, but he has modelled the body with an elegant and chaste delicacy; the dress follows the form without revealing it indiscreetly, and the gesture with which the young woman presses the flower against her is natural. The statuette is painted dark red, except the eyes and the embroidery, which are white, and the wig, which is black: the bracelets, the necklace, and the bandeau are of a yellow gold identical with the small book exhibited in the glass case marked Z in the “Salle civile.”78

Two inscriptions engraved on the pedestal, and then painted yellow, inform us of the name of the woman, and of that of the individual who dedicated the statue. One on the front runs thus:

(A) Adoration to Phtah
Sokar-Osiri,79 great God, Prince
of Eternity, to whom are given all kinds of good
things and pure things, to the double of the
perfect lady Naî of the true perfect voice.

The other is engraved on the right side, and runs:

(B) It is her Brother who makes her name to live,
the servant Phtah-Maî.

From other monuments we know more than one Egyptian of the name Phtah-Maî, and more than one lady Naî: but none of them has any claim to be identified with our two personages. Phtah-Maî is not a noble: he filled a very humble post, that of a page attached to a noble, or a subordinate employé of a temple or of a court of justice. But the charm of the monument he devoted to the memory of his sister is only the more remarkable.

The personage in the middle is a priest, standing, wearing the short wig with little locks of hair in rows one above the other. The bust is bare, and his only garment is a long skirt falling half way down the leg, spread out in front into a sort of pleated apron. In his two hands he bears a sacred insignia consisting of a ram’s head surmounted by the solar disk, and forming an ægis, the whole set into a staff of fairly large dimensions: the attitude is one of repose. The third figure, on the contrary, is full of movement and activity. It is an officer in semi-military costume of the time of Amenôphis III or of his successors: a small wig, a clinging smock with sleeves, a short loin-cloth tightly girded over the hips and scarcely descending to the middle of the thigh, decorated in front with a small piece of stuff standing out, pleated lengthwise. These two statuettes are painted dark red with the exception of the wig, which is black, of the cornea of the eyes, which is white, and the insignia of the priest, which is yellow. The old pedestal has disappeared, and with it the name. Like the limestone and wooden statues of large dimensions, these formed part of the funerary equipment: they were the supports of souls in miniature, and served as a body for the double of the model and kept alive the name of a person who had been loved or well known. There are a large number of them in the museums, and nearly all are of the same epoch. Neither the Ancient nor the Middle Empire made them—Saïte art preferred hard stone: the wooden statuettes that I have so far seen are of the second Theban period, and belong to the XVIIIth, XIXth, and XXth Dynasties.

Some of them, if not all, were used for purposes that seem strange to us. Several had little rolls of papyrus fastened to their pedestal or their body, ordinary letters that the writers sent to one another; one possessed by the Leyden Museum is an adjuration addressed to the perfect soul of the lady Ankhari by her still living husband:80 “What fault have I committed against thee that I should be reduced to the miserable condition in which I find myself? What have I done to justify this attack on me, if no fault has been committed against thee? From the time I became thy husband until this day, what have I done against thee that I should conceal? What shall I do when I have to bear witness to my conduct in regard to thee, and shall appear with thee before the tribunal of the dead, addressing myself to the cycle of the infernal gods, and thou wilt be judged after this writing, which is in words uttering my complaint in regard to what thou hast done. What wilt thou do?” The general tone of the piece is, as is clear, one of complaint and accusation. The husband laments about “the miserable condition to which he is reduced,” three years after he has become a widower; then he relates the incidents of his conjugal life in order to show the ingratitude he has received for his trouble and care. “When thou becamest my wife, I was young, I was with thee, I did not desert thee, I caused no grief to thy heart. Now so I acted when I was young; when I was promoted to high dignities by Pharaoh, I did not desert thee; I said: ‘Let them be mutual between us!’ and as everybody who came saw me with thee, thou didst not receive those whom thou didst not know, for I acted according to thy will. Now, here it is, thou hast not satisfied my heart and I shall plead with thee, and the true will be distinguished from the false.” He dwells on and reminds her of his kindnesses: “I have never been found acting brutally to thee like a peasant who enters other people’s houses.” When she died, during an eight months’ absence occasioned by his service with Pharaoh, “I did what was seeming for thee: I lamented thee greatly with my people opposite my dwelling, I gave stuffs and swathings for thy burial, and for that purpose had many linen cloths woven, and I omitted no good offering I could make thee.”81 The poor man does not state clearly the nature of the troubles from which he suffered. Perhaps he imagined that his wife tormented him in the form of a spectre; perhaps, what after all comes to the same thing in the belief of an Egyptian, he was attacked by diseases and overwhelmed with infirmities that he attributed to the malignity of the dead woman. We are reminded of the strange actions that the Icelanders of the Middle Ages practised against ghosts. The administration set on foot the whole cortège of officials and the whole of its legal code to bring the accusation, judge and condemn the dead who persisted in haunting the house in which they had lived. The records of the causes are extant and testify to the gravity that presided over this strange procedure. The Leyden papyrus certainly relates to an affair of the kind. A husband, addressing his wife’s soul, summons her to suspend persecutions that are in no way justified, under pain of answering for her conduct before the infernal jury. If she did not heed this preliminary advice, the matter would be brought later before the tribunal of the gods of the west and pleaded: the papyrus would serve as a piece of convincing evidence, and then “the true would be distinguished from the false.”

There was one difficulty to be overcome: how was the summons to be sent to her? The Egyptians were never embarrassed when it was a question of communicating with the other world. The husband read the letter in the tomb, then fastened it to a figure of the woman. Thus she could not fail to receive the adjuration as she received the funerary banquet, or the effect of the prayers that assured her happiness beyond the tomb. The preoccupations of art held only a subordinate place in statues like those of the lady Naî and her two companions: the religious idea was predominant, and it was religion which gave the monument its meaning.