History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 2 — 32 - Vol. 02, Ch. 03: The First Theban Empire, pt. 8

These voyages were dangerous and trying: popular imagination seized upon them and made material out of them for marvellous tales.

The hero chosen was always a daring adventurer sent by his master to collect gold from the mines of Nubia; by sailing further and further up the river, he reached the mysterious sea which forms the southern boundary of the world.

“I set sail in a vessel one hundred and fifty cubits long, forty wide, with one hundred and fifty of the best sailors in the land of Egypt, who had seen heaven and earth, and whose hearts were more resolute than those of lions.

They had foretold that the wind would not be contrary, or that there would be even none at all; but a squall came upon us unexpectedly while we were in the open, and as we approached the land, the wind freshened and raised the waves to the height of eight cubits.

As for me, I clung to a beam, but those who were on the vessel perished without one escaping.

A wave of the sea cast me on to an island, after having spent three days alone with no other companion than my own heart.

I slept there in the shade of a thicket; then I set my legs in motion in quest of something for my mouth.

” The island produced a quantity of delicious fruit: he satisfied his hunger with it, lighted a fire to offer a sacrifice to the gods, and immediately, by the magical power of the sacred rites, the inhabitants, who up to this time had been invisible, were revealed to his eyes.

“I heard a sound like that of thunder, which I at first took to be the noise of the flood-tide in the open sea; but the trees quivered, the earth trembled.

I uncovered my face, and I perceived that it was a serpent which was approaching.

He was thirty cubits in length, and his wattles exceeded two cubits; his body was incrusted with gold, and his colour appeared like that of real lapis.

He raised himself before me and opened his mouth; while I prostrated myself before him, he said to me: ‘Who hath brought thee, who hath brought thee, little one, who hath brought thee?

If thou dost not tell me immediately who brought thee to this island, I will cause thee to know thy littleness: either thou shalt faint like a woman, or thou shalt tell me something which I have not yet heard, and which I knew not before thee.

’ Then he took me into his mouth and carried me to his dwelling-place, and put me down without hurting me; I was safe and sound, and nothing had been taken from me.

” Our hero tells the serpent the story of his shipwreck, which moves him to pity and induces him to reciprocate his confidence.

“Fear nothing, fear nothing, little one, let not thy countenance be sad!

If thou hast come to me, it is the god who has spared thy life; it is he who has brought thee into this ‘Isle of the Double,’ where nothing is lacking, and which is filled with all good things.

Here thou shalt pass one month after another till thou hast remained four months in this island, then shall come a vessel from thy country with mariners; thou canst depart with them to thy country, and thou shalt die in thy city.

To converse rejoices the heart, he who enjoys conversation bears misfortune better; I will therefore relate to thee the history of this island.

” The population consisted of seventy-five serpents, all of one family: it formerly comprised also a young girl, whom a succession of misfortunes had cast on the island, and who was killed by lightning.

The hero, charmed with such good nature, overwhelmed the hospitable dragon with thanks, and promised to send him numerous presents on his return home.

“I will slay asses for thee in sacrifice, I will pluck birds for thee, I will send to thee vessels filled with all the riches of Egypt, meet for a god, the friend of man in a distant country unknown to men.

” The monster smiled, and replied that it was needless to think of sending presents to one who was the ruler of Pûanît; besides, “as soon as thou hast quitted this place, thou wilt never again see this island, for it will be changed into waves.

”--“And then, when the vessel appeared, according as he had predicted to me, I went and perched upon a high tree and sought to distinguish those who manned it.

I next ran to tell him the news, but I found that he was already informed of its arrival, and he said to me: ‘A pleasant journey home, little one; mayst thou behold thy children again, and may thy name be well spoken of in thy town; such are my wishes for thee!

’ He added gifts to these obliging words.

I placed all these on board the vessel which had come, and prostrating myself, I adored him.

He said to me: ‘After two months thou shalt reach thy country, thou wilt press thy children to thy bosom, and thou shalt rest in thy sepulchre.

’ After that I descended the shore to the vessel, and I hailed the sailors who were in it.

I gave thanks on the shore to the master of the island, as well as to those who dwelt in it.

” This might almost be an episode in the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor; except that the monsters which Sindbad met with in the course of his travels were not of such a kindly disposition as the Egyptian serpent: it did not occur to them to console the shipwrecked with the charm of a lengthy gossip, but they swallowed them with a healthy appetite.

Putting aside entirely the marvellous element in the story, what strikes us is the frequency of the relations which it points to between Egypt and Pûanît. The appearance of an Egyptian vessel excites no astonishment on its coasts: the inhabitants have already seen many such, and at such regular intervals, that they are able to predict the exact date of their arrival.

The distance between the two countries, it is true, was not considerable, and a voyage of two months was sufficient to accomplish it.

While the new Egypt was expanding outwards in all directions, the old country did not cease to add to its riches.

The two centuries during which the XIIth dynasty continued to rule were a period of profound peace; the monuments show us the country in full possession of all its resources and its arts, and its inhabitants both cheerful and contented.

More than ever do the great lords and royal officers expatiate in their epitaphs upon the strict justice which they have rendered to their vassals and subordinates, upon the kindness which they have shown to the fellahîn, on the paternal solicitude with which, in the years of insufficient inundations or of bad harvests, they have striven to come forward and assist them, and upon the unheard-of disinterestedness which kept them from raising the taxes during the times of average Niles, or of unusual plenty.

Gifts to the gods poured in from one end of the country to the other, and the great building works, which had been at a standstill since the end of the VIth dynasty, were recommenced simultaneously on all sides.

There was much to be done in the way of repairing the ruins, of which the number had accumulated during the two preceding centuries.

Not that the most audacious kings had ventured to lay their hands on the sanctuaries: they emptied the sacred treasuries, and partially confiscated their revenues, but when once their cupidity was satisfied, they respected the fabrics, and even went so far as to restore a few inscriptions, or, when needed, to replace a few stones.

These magnificent buildings required careful supervision: in spite of their being constructed of the most durable materials--sand-stone, granite, limestone,--in spite of their enormous size, or of the strengthening of their foundations by a bed of sand and by three or four courses of carefully adjusted blocks to form a substructure, the Nile was ever threatening them, and secretly working at their destruction.

Its waters, filtering through the soil, were perpetually in contact with the lower courses of these buildings, and kept the foundations of the walls and the bases of the columns constantly damp: the saltpetre which the waters had dissolved in their passage, crystallising on the limestone, would corrode and undermine everything, if precautions were not taken.

When the inundation was over, the subsidence of the water which impregnated the subsoil caused in course of time settlements in the most solid foundations: the walls, disturbed by the unequal sinking of the ground, got out of the perpendicular and cracked; this shifting displaced the architraves which held the columns together, and the stone slabs which formed the roof.

These disturbances, aggravated from year to year, were sufficient, if not at once remedied, to entail the fall of the portions attacked; in addition to this, the Nile, having threatened the part below with destruction, often hastened by direct attacks the work of ruin, which otherwise proceeded slowly.

A breach in the embankments protecting the town or the temple allowed its waters to rush violently through, and thus to effect large gaps in the decaying walls, completing the overthrow of the columns and wrecking the entrance halls and secret chambers by the fall of the roofs.

At the time when Egypt came under the rule of the XIIth dynasty there were but few cities which did not contain some ruined or dilapidated sanctuary.

Amenemhâît I. , although fully occupied in reducing the power of the feudal lords, restored; the temples as far as he was able, and his successors pushed forward the work vigorously for nearly two centuries.

The Delta profited greatly by this activity in building.

The monuments there had suffered more than anywhere else: fated to bear the first shock of foreign invasion, and transformed into fortresses while the towns in which they were situated were besieged, they have been captured again and again by assault, broken down by attacking engines, and dismantled by all the conquerors of Egypt, from the Assyrians to the Arabs and the Turks.

The fellahîn in their neighbourhood have for centuries come to them to obtain limestone to burn in their kilns, or to use them as a quarry for sandstone or granite for the doorways of their houses, or for the thresholds of their mosques.

Not only have they been ruined, but the remains of their ruins have, as it were, melted away and almost entirely disappeared in the course of ages.

And yet, wherever excavations have been made among these remains which have suffered such deplorable ill-treatment, colossi and inscriptions commemorating the Pharaohs of the XIIth dynasty have been brought to light.

Amenemhâît I. founded a great temple at Tanis in honour of the gods of Memphis: the vestiges of the columns still scattered on all sides show that the main body of the building was of rose granite, and a statue of the same material has preserved for us a portrait of the king.

He is seated, and wears the tall head-dress of Osiris.

He has a large smiling face, thick lips, a short nose, and big staring eyes: the expression is one of benevolence and gentleness, rather than of the energy and firmness which one would expect in the founder of a dynasty.

The kings who were his successors all considered it a privilege to embellish the temple and to place in it some memorial of their veneration for the god.

Ûsirtasen I. , following the example of his father, set up a statue of himself in the form of Osiris: he is sitting on his throne of grey granite, and his placid face unmistakably recalls that of Amenemhâît I. Amenemhâît II.

, Usirtasen II.

, and his wife Nofrît have also dedicated their images within the sanctuary.

Nofrît’s is of black granite: her head is almost eclipsed by the heavy Hâthor wig, consisting of two enormous tresses of hair which surround the cheeks, and lie with an outward curve upon the breast; her eyes, which were formerly inlaid, have fallen out, the bronze eyelids are lost, her arms have almost disappeared.

What remains of her, however, gives us none the less the impression of a young and graceful woman, with a lithe and well-proportioned body, whose outlines are delicately modelled under the tight-fitting smock worn by Egyptian women; the small and rounded breasts curve outward between the extremities of her curls and the embroidered hem of her garment; and a pectoral bearing the name of her husband lies flat upon her chest, just below the column of her throat.

[Illustration: 372. jpg THE STATUE OF NOFRIT] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Insinger.

In addition to the complete statue, the Museum at Gîzeh possesses a torso from the same source.

I believe I can recognize another portrait of the same queen in a beautiful statue in black granite, which has been in the Museum at Marseilles since the beginning of the present century.

These various statues have all an evident artistic relationship to the beautiful granite figures of the Ancient Empire.

The sculptors who executed them belonged to the same school as those who carved Khephren out of the solid diorite: there is the same facile use of the chisel, the same indifference to the difficulties presented by the material chosen, the same finish in the detail, the same knowledge of the human form.

One is almost tempted to believe that Egyptian art remained unchanged all through those long centuries, and yet as soon as a statue of the early period is placed side by side with one of the XIIth dynasty, we immediately perceive something in the one which is lacking in the other.

It is a difference in feeling, even if the technique remains unmodified.

It was the man himself that the sculptors desired to represent in the older Pharaohs, and however haughty may be the countenance which we admire in the Khephren, it is the human element which predominates in him.

The statues of Amenemhâît I. and his successors appear, on the contrary, to represent a superior race: at the time when these were produced, the Pharaoh had long been regarded as a god, and the divine nature in him had almost eliminated the human.

Whether intentionally or otherwise, the sculptors idealized their model, and made him more and more resemble the type of the divinities.

The head always appears to be a good likeness, but smoothed down and sometimes lacking in expression.

Not only are the marks of age rendered less apparent, and the features made to bear the stamp of perpetual youth, but the characteristics of the individual, such as the accentuation of the eyebrows, the protuberance of the cheek-bones, the projection of the under lip, are all softened down as if intentionally, and made to give way to a uniform expression of majestic tranquillity.

One king only, Amenemhâît III.

, refused to go down to posterity thus effaced, and caused his portrait to be taken as he really was.

He has certainly the round full face of Amenemhâît or of Usirtasen I. , and there is an undeniable family likeness between him and his ancestors; but at the first glance we feel sure that the artist has not in any way flattered his model.

The forehead is low and slightly retreating, narrow across the temples; his nose is aquiline, pronounced in form, and large at the tip; the thick lips are slightly closed; his mouth has a disdainful curve, and its corners are turned down as if to repress the inevitable smile common to most Egyptian statues; the chin is full and heavy, and turns up in front in spite of the weight of the false beard dependent from it; he has small narrow eyes, with full lids; his cheekbones are accentuated and projecting, the cheeks hollow, and the muscles about the nose and mouth strongly defined.

The whole presents so strange an aspect, that for a long time statues of this type have been persistently looked upon as productions of an art which was only partially Egyptian.

It is, indeed, possible that the Tanis sphinxes were turned out of workshops where the principles and practice of the sculptor’s art had previously undergone some Asiatic influence; the bushy mane which surrounds the face, and the lion’s ears emerging from it, are exclusively characteristic of the latter.

The purely human statues in which we meet with the same type of countenance have no peculiarity of workmanship which could be attributed to the imitation of a foreign art.

If the nameless masters to whom we owe their existence desired to bring about a reaction against the conventional technique of their contemporaries, they at least introduced no foreign innovations; the monuments of the Memphite period furnished them with all the models they could possibly wish for.