Part 19 (1/1)

Ernest Feydeau has attempted for the Thebes of the Pharaohs, and his restoration, as complete as it is possible for it to be, and which no historian had attempted, stands out before us as sharply as a plan in relief, and with all the perspective of a panorama Thebes of the Hundred Gates, as Ho more about this ancestress of capitals; but M Ernest Feydeau takes us walking with hih the city of Rameses; he shows us all its s of the inhabitants, the gardens, the harbour, the fleet of vessels; he draws and colours the costumes of the people; he enters the hare musicians, the dancers, the enslaved nations which built for the Egyptians, the soldiers round, the processions of Ae and corn, the caravans of thirty-five hundred years ago bringing in the tribute Then he describes the colleges of priests, the quarters inhabited by the e processes, the funeral rites, the construction of the thousands of hypogea and mummy pits which are to receive the h the streets of that strange city, the funeral procession of a royal scribe upon its catafalque, drawn by oxen,--the nu ale does not allow ofthe reader to e Unquestionably no iven acity, Constantinople, Rome, or Cairo The artist see and painting from nature as if he were a contemporary of Rameses, and as if the sands had not covered with their shroud, through which show a few gigantic ruins, the city forever vanished And yet he indulges in no chance supposition, in no rash padding Every detail he gives is supported by the most authentic documents M Ernest Feydeau put aside every doubtful piece of infor interpreted in more than one way He seems to have been anxious to forestall the suspiciousthe dry results of erudition clothed in poetic language, and who do not believe that a treatise on archaeology can possibly be read with as yptians have left us no books, and had they done so the art of deciphering hieroglyphics or even phonetic or deh to allow of absolute trust being put in it Happily the Egyptians perforhtiness that it alyphic inscriptions they carved on the walls of palaces and temples, on the sides of pylons, the faces of the corridors and the bays of funeral chai and on the stelae, on the covers and the interior cartonnages of the mummies,--in short, on every sranite, basalt or porphyry, with an ineffaceable line coloured with tints that the long succession of ages has not faded,--scenes in which we find in detail the habits and customs and the ceremonies of the oldest civilisation in the world It see the difficulty which posterity would experience in deciphering their hieroglyphics, intrusted their translation to drawing, and ea tell the secret kept by the papyri

Royal ceremonies, triumphal entries, the payriculture, sport, fishi+ng, banqueting, dances, the intimate life of the hares, so clearly draith the difference in races, variety of types, shape of chariots, of weapons, of arms, of furniture, of utensils, of food, of plants, still clearly visible to-day A maker of musical instruments could certainly make a harp, a lyre, or a sistru the female musicians at the funeral repast represented in one of the to-cart in a plate of es is not drawn more accurately than the profile of the chariot seen in the funeral procession of the ecclesiastical scribe of Ahteenth dynasty

The author has not confined himself to these purely material details He has examined the funeral papyri which, more or less valuable, are found with each ns which represent the judghed before Osiris and the forty-two judges, and thus he has yptians on the question of the future life The soul, whether it was conducted to Aions--that is, towards the West--by the dog-headed ed with the carrying out of sentences,--the soul was, nevertheless, not freed from all connection with the body; its relative irity of the latter; the alteration, the deprivation of one of the limbs was supposed to be felt by the soul, the form of whose impalpable spectre would have beenor an arious care taken of the human remains, the infallible methods and the minute precautions of the embalmers, the perfect solidity and the secret location of the tombs, of which the priests alone possessed the plan, the constant thought of eternity in death which characterised in so striking a yptians and makes them a nation apart, incoer to give back to the earth and to cause to disappear the generations which have preceded theypt, M Ernest Feydeau, who is not only an archaeologist but also a poet, after he had sounded the dom of the Pharaohs, became passionately attached to that art which the Greek ideal--which nevertheless is indebted to it for more than one lesson--has caused us to despise too much He has understood, both as a painter and a sculptor, a beauty which is so different from our own standard and which is yet so real

Hathor, the Egyptian Venus, seems to hi that feeling, I confess to adreatly the clean outline, so pure, so slender, and so full of life In spite of the hieratic restrictions which did not allow the consecrated attitude to be varied, art shows out in e and penetrating charn to our own habits in the heads with their delicate profiles, their great eyes er by the use of antimony, the soue s that of the sphinx, in the rounded cheeks upon which hang broad discs of gold, in the brows shaded by lotus flowers, in the temples framed in by the narrow tresses of the hair, powdered with blue powder, which are shown in funeral processions

How youthful, how fresh, how pure are the tall, slender bodies, the swelling bosoms, the supple waists, the narrow hips of these dancers and ers and their long, narrow feet The Etruscans theraceful, and ant upon the bodies of their finest vases, and in nised attitudes and gestures borrowed froypt It is froe size, its Doric and Ionic orders and its Corinthian capital, in which the acanthus takes the place of the lotus flower