Volume I Part 9 (1/2)
-- 6 _That Egyptian Art did not escape the Law of Change, and that its History may therefore be written_
It yptian architecture, sculpture, and painting, to dispel a prejudice which in spite of recent discoveries still exists in soyptian art This mistake is a very ancient one The Greeks were the first to ard to this we o they appear to have recognized the very principle of which we are now speaking--that their young citizens must be habituated to forms and strains of virtue These they fixed, and exhibited patterns of them in their temples; and no painter or artist is allowed to innovate upon them, or to leave the traditional forms and invent new ones To this day no alteration is allowed, either in these arts or in music, at all And you will find that their works of art are painted or o--(this is literally true and no exaggeration)--their ancient paintings and sculptures are not a whit better or worse than the work of to-day, but are made with just the same skill”
[84] t?? a?t?? d? t????? ?pe???as??a, etc Laws, 656 D E [We have quoted frolish version, p 226, vol v--ED]
This strange assertion was long accepted without question even in ists of the last century, whose credulity is to be accounted for by their lack of ment In 1828 in his first lecture at the Bibliotheque Royale, Raoul-Rochette turned his attention to Egypt He had before his eyes, in the Parisian ypte_, works which dated froh the still lory of the Boulak Museuht have perceived and pointed out the difference between the statues of Ousourtesen, Thothmes, and Rameses on the one hand, and those of the Sait epoch; still more should he have reuish the ypt from those which were erected under the Ptolemies and the Roman emperors What he did say, however, and say with consummate confidence was: ”From the first of the Pharaohs to the last of the Ptoleypt never varied”[85]
[85] _Cours d'Archeologie_, 8vo 1829, pp 10, 11 This critic's ideas upon Egyptian art were both superficial and false
”Egyptian art,” he says, ”never attempted any realistic i, such as, for instance, ”The fundayptian art was the absence of art” (p 12)
Such crude notions as this can no longer be upheld M Marriette protests in the following alainst certain utterances of M Renan which seemed to him to imply the saypt as a sort of China, walled in and fortified against the exterior world, ile spring at a degree of civilization which it never surpassed He looks upon the country as a great plain, green indeed and fertile, but without accidents of contour to break the randeur and decadence more marked than those of other countries Her civilization went through all the different phases; it went through many complete transformations, it had its sudden moments of brilliancy and its epochs of eclipse Its art was not so stationary as to prevent us froypt was felt from Mesopotaypt perished because in attacking foreign nations she provoked a reaction which was fatal to her”[87]
[86] See the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of April 1, 1865
[87] _Voyage dans la Haute egypte_, vol i
Now that we are enabled to contrast the statues of the Ptolemaic period with those of the pyrae; but even before these means of study were open to us, criticism should have cast more than doubt upon the assertions of Plato; it should have appealed froies to the monuments themselves to tell the truth, to those monuments which were best known and understood Was it likely, was it possible, that such a people as that which created these monuments, should remain for more than forty centuries unaffected by the law of continual, even if alht have we thus to place Egypt and China apart from the rest of humanity? There are, it is true, some peoples who are more attached than others to traditional customs and ancient institutions; they are h their evolution is a slower process, it is there; our eyes cannot perceive any movement in the small hand of a watch, but yet it does move exactly in the same fashi+on as that which marks the seconds Upon the banks of the Peiho as upon those of the Nile, upon the whole surface of our planet, man _is_ not; he _becomes_, to borrow one of the favourite expressions of German philosophy History can adypt In the cases of both those countries there is a certain illusion, which is to be explained by our ignorance We are not well enough acquainted with therasp the different periods of their political and social, their artistic and literary develophted the details of the most varied landscape beco fields are blended together; hollows and hillocks lose the vigour of their contours
China, as we have said, does not enter into our purview; and as for Egypt, the deeper we penetrate into her history thecareer was troubled by moments of crisis similar to those which have come to other huive us reason to suspect that it was so, and the monuments which have been discovered insist upon the same truth, and compel us to accept it For certain epochs these are very abundant, beautiful, and varied Afterwards they becoain they reappear in great nueneral character These contrasts and teain How, then, can we doubt that here, as elsewhere, there were alternations of grandeur and poverty, of periods of conquest and expansion and epochs of civil war or of defeat by foreign invaders?
May we not believe that through the clouds which obscure the causes of such changes we limpses of those periods of decadence and renascence which, following one upon the other, exhausted in the end the genius of the race?
Let us take a single exa of all ”After the sixth dynasty all docu until the eleventh, the first of the Middle Empire This is one of those sudden interruptions in the history of Egypt which may be compared to the temporary disappearance of those curious rivers which run partly underground”[88]
[88] M MELCHOIR DE VOGue, _Chez les Pharaons_ (_Revue des Deux Mondes_ of Jan 15, 1877)
[Illustration: FIG 47--Statue from the Ancient Eoin]
When historians, living as long after our nineteenth century as we do after the epochs of Meypt, come to treat the history of the past, they will perhaps look upon the ages which rolled away between the fall of Graeco-Ro in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as no longer than that which divided the ancient froypt, or the latter from the dynasties of Thebes In the distant future ue fashi+on, that between the fall of Ro, or that of A the nations, and an apparent recoil of civilization; but ap, over that period which we call the Middle Ages The Roman empire will seem to touch our modern civilization, and ly will be iion and new inventions, but they will take more account of the resees, overnment will seem to them continuations of those of Greece and Rome In that which we call antiquity, and in Christian Europe, they will find similar literary habits and standards of criticism, the same judicial nomenclature, the same terms for s and Caesars These different civilizations are like star clusters To us who are aenerations which are divided from them by a vast space of time they will seem to form but one nebulous body
[Illustration: FIG 48--Woh Statuette frooin]
[Illustration: FIG 49--The Scribe Chaphre Fifth dynasty Boulak
Lireat convulsions like the rest of the world She met with disasters, and underwent periods of confusion like those which overtook the nations of the West between the reigns of Trajan and Charlene Wars and invasions, the action and reaction of civilization, had upon her the sa her sentiments and ideas, caused their plastic expression to pass through a series of changes in taste and style The Theban tomb of the time of Rameses is very different from that of Memphis and the ancient ereater pyranificent than any of their predecessors It was the same with sculpture A cultivated eye has no need to run to inscriptions to enable it to distinguish betorks of the ancient and of the middle empire; nor will it confound works created in either of those periods with those of the Sait epoch The differences are alists to distinguish a torso of the time of Phidias from one of the school of Praxiteles or Lysippus These differences it will be our duty to describe hereafter, but our readers may perhaps discover them for themselves if they exaed in chronological order
Variety is universal in Egypt, local variety as well as that of different periods Language had its dialects as well as art The pronunciation of Upper and that of Lower Egypt was quite dissimilar, except in the case of a few letters In the same way different cities had distinct schools of sculpture and painting, which were distinguished from one another by their traditional methods of conception and execution Neither under Ousourtesen nor under Rameses, had art the same character in the cities of the Delta, in Me the works in sculpture executed for Raant and refined than those of Thebes
[Illustration: FIG 50--The Lady Na Wooden statue from the 19th or 20th dynasty Louvre]
How, then, are we to explain the error committed by Plato, and by him transmitted to posterity? The explanation is easy The Greeks visited Egypt too late in its history to foryptians were still trying, by violent but spasmodic efforts, to reconquer the independence which had been destroyed by the successor of Cyrus But the les were to be abandoned, and they were to finally succun blood Their still brilliant civilization er, but the decadence had commenced--a decadence slow indeed, but none the more remediable
Some years after the visit of Plato, the two Nectanebos, etic ardour to the restoration of the ancient buildings of the country and to the construction of new ones, such as the tened with their naypt; but these sis see power, an uncertainty of theto deceive itself and to hide its oeakness Nothing could be more precarious than the political conditions under which this activity was displayed
The independence of the country was ht services of Spartan and Athenian yptian revolts, and she was, perhaps, but watching her opportunity to cast the hordes of Asia upon the unhappy country for a third ti” could always find troops to take part in the spoiling of a country whose riches had proved so inexhaustible And if, by any remote chance, the Persians should fail in their enterprise, another and a graver danger would rowth of the Greek power in the Mediterranean Since the period of the Persian wars, the language, the literature, the arts, the reat rapidity; and the ht be foreseen when a supremacy founded upon intellectual worth would be confirmed by military triumph and the creation of a vast hellenic eun by the Ionian soldiers and merchants ere introduced into the Nile valley by Psemethek; it was bloodlessly coyptians had been accusto theer for instruction The latter posed as disciples before the priests of Memphis and Heliopolis, and freely expressed a warmth of admiration which could not fail to flatter the national vanity The Greeks would be better yptians would, at least, obtain good administration and coion in return for their taxes