Art in Egypt

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ART IN | ©. MASPERO

SMITHSONIAN ghSTITUTION

Part I

PAGE THE BEGINNINGS OF ART IN EGYPT CHAPTER I PEINECR CART: ie Se ac ee eee CHAPTER II PEMD TE CARTS ok 25 Yeo Gi Bk cae eee OT cr eae PART II THEBAN ART CHAPTER I THE FIRST THEBAN AGE FROM THE ELEVENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH DYNASTY 60. oe 95 CHAPTER II THE SECOND THEBAN AGE FROM THE EIGHTEENTH TO THE TWENTY- FIRST DYNASTY .. ae oe De SD PART III

THE SAITE AGE AND THE END OF EGYPTIAN ART LADD Coe a pee eee rn rcs ei am Paar een aa er rere SS xi

FIG. I,—SHUNET-EZ-ZEBiB, ABYDOS. TYPE OF THINITE FORTRESS.

PART I THE BEGINNINGS OF ART IN EGYPT

CHAPTER | THINITE ART

Primitive Art in Egypt before Menes — Thinite Art and its Remains: Architecture, Fortresses, Palaces, Temples, Tombs — In it we may trace the Principles and Forms which, developing in the course of centuries, gave to Egyptian Art its characteristic aspect — Memphite Art was developed by contact with it.

HE most ancient tombs, those of the prehistoric period, have

so far yielded nothing which indicates any extraordinary development of the artistic sense among the early Egyptians. The objects found in them bear witness to a taste for personal adornment, and for decorated arms and utensils, equal, but by no means superior to that of most semi-civilised nations. They consist of coloured pottery, either glazed or unglazed, plain, or covered with incised or painted ornament, furniture of wood or stone, jewelry of variegated pebbles, of shells, rough or carved, of bone, ivory, glassy pastes, and precious metals; finally, figures of men and animals, some designed for personal use, such as receptacles for cosmetics, others reserved for funerary rites. The persons and things represented on vases are not grouped methodically in superposed rows, but are scattered irregularly over the surface at the will of the designer, here a house, there an animal,

B a palm-tree, a boat, a few fish. They reveal facility in seizing living forms, and a natural skill in translating attitudes and

FIG. 2.—THE ABYDOS BRACELETS. (Museum, Cairo.) (Phot. E. Brugsch.)

movement by drawing and modelling. But there is nothing to compare with the sculptures and paintings that contemporaries of the Reindeer Period were executing in the regions now known as France and Spain.

Nevertheless, when we pass from these productions to which no exact date can be assigned, to those of the historic dynasties, we are confronted by thousands of objects and buildings, the execution of which secures a high place for the Egyptians among the nations of the East in the realm of art. Where we had found only the rude essays of laborious apprentices, and the rudiments of a craftsmanship as -yet uncertain of itself, we come suddenly, and almost without transition, to the works of masters, and to a highly accomplished technique.

FIG. 3.—IVORY FEET OF A BED AND A STOOL. (Museum, Cairo.) (Phot. E. Brugsch.)

Must we conclude that between the two stages, alien races from without had dominated the natives, bringing them a conception of beauty and a power of realising it which they had lacked heretofore? It seems improbable that asudden efflorescence of art should have followed on a foreign invasion; but if there are no extant monuments by which we may gauge the natural evolution of the Egyptian genius, we are compelle

to recognise among the artisans of the Thinite age, the inspiration and even the processes of preceding generations, Their jewelry had preserved the earlier tradition, and their happiest effects were inspired by it. I may cite the four bracelets discovered by Petrie in the necropolis of Abydos (Fig. 2), with their alternating plates of graven gold and

FIG. 4.—FIGURINES OF ANIMALS, MONKEY, LION, DOGS. (Museum, Cairo.) (Phot. E. Brugsch.)

of turquoise or light blue glass, their beads or pendants of carved amethyst, and the chased floral ornament, the delicacy of which might be envied by our modern goldsmiths. The same might be said of furniture and domestic utensils, feet of bedsteads or stools in wood and in ivory (Fig. 3), figurines of lions, monkeys, and dogs (Fig. 4), stone or crystal fish, statuettes of prisoners orslaves, bone tablets on which the principal episodes of royal sepulture were traced with the style (Fig. 5), cylinders bearing hieroglyphic legends or divine emblems, club-heads, etc. In all these we recognise the earlyideas and conventions, with this difference, that what was the result of pure instinct in the beginning has become that of deliberate intention. Craftsmen or artists, the experience of an unknown number of generations had _ taught

FIG. 5.—THE TABLET OF AHA, (Museum, Cairo.) (Phot. E. Brugsch.)

them gradually to bring out the principal lines of their models, to fix their contours, to simplify their reliefs, to co-ordinate their

B 2 movements and their postures. They took pleasure in slow and tranquil gestures; if the nature of their subjects, religious processions, hunting and battle - scenes, assaults on cities, the pursuit of enemies, forced them to express violent or rapid action, they did their utmost to minimise its hard abruptness. It will be readily supposed without much insistence on the point, that an art so wellregulated implies a long period of

FIG. 06.—GROOVED FACADE OF THINITE preliminary effort and pa

“TOMBS AND WOucseasie: : periment. In spite of ex-

(After Garstang.) ternal divergences, the

elements are those chosen

and employed by the ancestors of its practitioners from the

beginning; but the workman had handled them so often and for

so long that by dint of practice he had at last reduced them to

a system, and had replaced the direct observation of nature by the

constantuse of decorative schemes

or of formule accepted in the workshop.

The impression made by the industrial arts is confirmed by the rarer survivals of the higher arts, architecture, sculpture, and painting. Very little has come down to us of the military and civil or indeed of the religious architecture; we have the ruins of a fortress at Hieraconpolis, in Abydos (cf. Fig. 1) and in one or two small townships of the Said, while in some of the ritual tablets and the hieroglyphic writings we FIG. 7.—PLAN OF THE FORTRESS OF find incidental renderings of Se-

ROP en suc sihets Camuben) veral very ancient temples (cf.

Fig. 8). The fortresses, or rather castles in which the kings and nobles lived, are vast parallelograms of sun-dried brick, the walls of which are sometimes perfectly

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KML Mihi bs bidkidisibdbddididddddddddédddéddaédé smooth and unadorned from one angle to the other, sometimes divided into panels, the beds of which are alternately horizontal

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FIG. 8.—VARIOUS TYPES OF ARCHAIC CHAPELS AND TEMPLES.

and concave, and sometimes finally present a series of vertical prismatic grooves (Fig. 6). The principal doorway is generally relegated to the end of one of the lateral walls, and is set in a block of masonry solid enought to defy sap and ram (Fig. 7). Private persons inhabited buildings of beaten earth or dried brick similar to those of the modern fellahin, and like these, generally of a single storey. The temple was an isolated cell, of variable dimensions, but always of small extent, raised upon an artificial mound at the endof arectangular enclosure bounded by a low wall or rows of piles; two posts were set up in front of the entrance, and the emblem of the god crowned the roof, or was raised on a pole in the middle of the enclosure (Fig. 8). The cella consisted at first of four wooden uprights, connected by wickerwork plastered with mud; the doorway was closed by a wooden panel or a hanging

FIG. Q.—WOODEN NAOS. mat. In some cases, the (Museum Turin) (Phot. Lanzone.)

roof was flat, with or without

a cornice; but in general, it described a peculiar curve from

front to back, the form of which persisted after the little build- 5

ART VIN: EGYPT ing of slight materials had become a naos of wood (Fig. 9) or of stone covered with inscriptions and hieroglyphic scenes (Fig. 10). To this cell other cabins were soon added for the accommodation of auxiliary gods, priests, and offerings, and the whole, symmetrically arranged in an enclosure, constituted a divine palace, analogous to the royal dwelling. At a later stage the gods, dissatisfied with so poor a dwelling, demanded thicker walls made of bricks, and stone for thresholds, lintels, architraves, and the bases of columns; then limestone or sandstone was substituted for brick, with granite to surround the bays, and the perishable huts of an earlier age became houses of eternity, without, however, changing the main lines of the primitive plan.

The fragments which we possess of the temple dedicated to the gods of Hieraconpolis prove that the transformation was already far advanced under the Third Dynasty. They formed part of a doorway of pink granite, the exterior FIG. I0.—SIDE OF NAOS OF SAFT-EL-HENNEH. faces of which were decor- (Museum, Cairo.) (Phot. L. Brugsch.) ated with royal legends (Fig. 11), and with basreliefs which were effaced during one of the reconstructions of the building; the patterns made by the hammer-strokes enable us to divine that these reliefs represented the sovereign adoring the divinity with the ritual familiar to us on the monuments of the Theban era. . ss Like the temples, the tombs of the Thinite age retained the principal features of those of the earlier period at Abydos, at Nakadah, at Hieraconpolis, and in all places where they have been discovered hitherto. The most famous, that of Nakadah (Fig. 12), did not belong, as might have been supposed, to the Menes who founded the Egyptian Empire, nor to some other Menes almost contemporary with him; it guarded the mummy of 6 some nameless lord, who ruled a portion of the Theban plain. Imagine a rectangle some 176 feet long by 88 wide, running diagonally from north to south. It is composed entirely of unfired bricks cemented and plastered with clay, without either limewash or painting.

The exterior surfaces were originally decorated with the usual vertical grooves, and the plan of the interior included a large hall, separated from the enclosing wall by a narrow passage, and divided into five compartments ranged in a line on the main axis. The corpse was laid in the central compartment, and his household goods were arranged partly on the ground around him, partly in the four other chambers. When these were full, they were walled up, and the adjoining passage was parcelled into cells for the reception of surplus provisions, after which the entrance was blocked, and the external decorations were masked by a facing of bricks, whitewashed over. The tombs of the “iiire on KOM-EL-AHMAR. Thinite Pharaohs excavated by Amé- (Museum, Cairo.) (Phot.L. Bragsch, lineau to the west of Abydos, and by Garstang at Rekaknah and at Bét-Khallaf (Figs. 13, 14) were not all exactly similar in arrangement; one was shaped somewhat like a shuttle, wider in the middle than at the two extremities; another was floored and panelled with wood, and their outer surfaces showed neither projections nor recesses.

None the less are they of the same type as that of Nakadah, and if we consider them as a whole, FIG. I2.—PLAN OF THE TOMB AT NAKADAH. we are struck by their (After De Morgan.) general resemblance to the fortresses of Abydos and Hieraconpolis. Like these, they have in some cases walls with prismatic niches; they have their store- 3 rooms and their lodging reserved for the chief; their doors are hidden away at the least accessible point, and they were blocked up after the deposition of the corpse, just as those of the

FIG. 13.—ROYAL TOMB AT BET-KHALLAF. (Phot Garstang.)

fortresses were barricaded in the hour of danger (Fig. 14). Thus the same intention governed the construction of each. Just as the fortress was the residence of the living lord or sovereign, the castle in which he held his court in peace, and in which he awaited behind barricaded doors the attacks of his enemies in war, so the tomb was looked upon as the castle of the dead lord or sovereign, in which he intrenched himself for all eternity, safe from the outrages of men and of years. If we remember that the temple was also a palace, the palace of the god, we shall be driven to admit that identity of terms here

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F1G. 14.—PLAN OF THE TOMB (After Garstang.)

denotes identity of conception, and that the manner of life of the lord or the Pharaoh before and after interment, was identical with that of the gods.

Originally, the monumental tomb had been the privilege of those powerful enoughtoprocure it, chiefs of clans, princes of Nomes, great officers of the crown, and kings; later, with the growth of wealth in the nation, the privilege was extended, and was conferred, under the conditions we shall presently note, on those of the people whose fortunes or the 8 favour of the master encouraged to aspire to the luxury of an independent future life.

The internal walls are generally speaking bare, but the priests or the relatives of the defunct stored up in the vault or in the chambers adjoining it the funereal trappings, furniture, provisions, and simulacra more or less rude of the dead man and of the servants who were despatched with him to the next world; they were there in numbers, each in the attitude proper to his rank or function; the master seated, or standing to receive offerings, the servants engaged in preparing or serving these, - grinding corn (Fig. 15), kneading dough, brewing beer, plastering a jar (Fig. - 16) before putting wine in it, busied with all the duties of the household, apparently inanimate, but impregnated with the latent life breathed into them by virtue of the rites. Gradually, however, the instinct which had moved the primeval Egyptians to decorate their pottery, led those of the archaic age to cover their a ae

. . FIG. 15 —WOMAN GRINDING CORN. walls with scenes intro- (Museum, Cairo.) (Phot. L. Brugsch.) ducing the persons whose figures had heretofore lain scattered on the ground. These were mute at first; later, they were accompanied by short inscriptions setting forth their deeds, their speeches, their names, the titles which constituted their civil status, and authenticated their rights to posthumous life. The earliest example is that discovered by Quibell at Kom-el-Ahmar. The motives were not as yet arranged in rows with methodical precision, but like those on the vases, they are scattered almost at random over the surface. The first essays are rude figures careless of form and proportion, awkwardly drawn with red ochre, like those with which our children adorn the margins of their books. With these we find the camp or the. village on the edge of the desert, gazelles and oryx browsing, running on the plain, or keeping watch on some rocky peak, men armed with darts or clubs, following a trail or fighting with hyenas, all the details, in short, which make up the hunter’s ideal of a happy life and a desirable Elysium. The noble who ordered the paintings and the artisan who daubed them had no conception of a life of the manes differing in any respect from that of the living, and they believed that the surest way of facilitating access to it was to introduce paintings of it in the tomb near the corpse. This belief was the logical conclusion of a dogma familiar to all semibarbarians: he who invents or reproduces a figure, no matter what, immediately creates a being, and if he afterwards gives it the name of a man, an animal, or an object, he endows it with a portion of soul stolen from that of the original. The life of the simulacrum ceases with that of its prototype, but the latter can prolong it and himself by means of incantations; and by virtue of these it may even be transmitted to all portraits of an individual executed after his death. Stone or wooden images took the place of the fleshly bodies of master and servants if these were missing, and thus assuming the function of a double, they guaranteed its perpetuity as long as they were preserved. The decoration of the tomb produced an

te identical effect; it prevented the annihi-

SERVANT TARRING A JAR. lation of the servants and the objects (Museum, Cairo.) (Phot.L Bragsch.) represented, and obliged them to minister

to the comfort of the master, as long as substantial traces of what it had reproduced remained upon the walls.

Briefly, all forms of art, architecture, sculpture, and painting, tended not to the disinterested search after beauty, but to the realisation of the useful. The three categories into which reasonable beings were divided, the living, the dead, and the gods, shared an intense desire for duration; they had bent all the most powerful springs of their minds in this direction, and the effort they had made to achieve it had given a special character to the arts. In the first place, it had determined the choice of materials. Men, whose years, however numerous, are but as a moment compared with the innumerable centuries of the dead and the gods, were content with slight materials: earth, wood, and freestone. If they made use of metals, it was less for their indestructibility than for the charm of their colour, the fineness of their texture, their ductility and their value.

The richest of the Pharaohs did not disdain to dwell in houses of sun-dried bricks, under roofs of beaten mud supported by wooden columns, between ceilings and pavements bedaubed FIG. 17.—PAINTINGS AT KOM-EL-AHMAR. (After Quibell.) with fragile paint-

ings; if their palaces lasted as long as they lived, they cared little that they should fall into ruin as soon as they themselves had disappeared. The case was very-different when the dwelling was destined for the dead or for the gods; then its longevity had to rival theirs, and this result was only to be achieved by the help of the most solid materials. Tombs and temples were accordingly built of limestone or sandstone of the best quality, and even of granite or the breccia of the Arabian mountains, which, however, was generally reserved for the doors, the thresholds, and such portions of the structure as the frequent passage of the faithful and the performance of religious rites tended to wear away rapidly; panegyrics upon the Pharaohs extolled them FIG. 18.—TEMPLE OF KHONSU AT KARNAK.

for having erected houses (Phot. Beato.)

of eternal stones for their

divine fathers. But as the density and durability of the blocks themselves was not sufficient to ensure the longevity of the building, care was taken to choose those architectural forms which promised the greatest stability, such as the pyramid, the mastaba, the rectangular temple, set firmly upon the soil under such conditions of equilibrium that only the hand of man or the attacks of the river could overthrow them; time has proved powerless against them.

FIG. I9.—THE SERVANTS OF TI BRINGING OFFERINGS. The reliefs with which they were

adorned were kept very low, or “left” on sunk surfaces, which diminished the risk of damage from concussion, and protected them from accidental mutilations. It was permissible for persons of modest means to employ wood for statues, and for divine or funerary groups; but if economy was not essential, limestone or sandstone, alabaster, schist, granite, serpentine, and diorite were preferred, and he who had none of these to hand sent into the desert to fetch them. Even then, statues were given one of the three or four attitudes which seemed least fragile; figures were seated upon a complete cube or on a seat with a straight back, or they stood with legs pressed together, arms adhering to the body, back and head engaged in a vertical slab. The care for solid- FIG. 20.—HARVEST SCENES IN THE TOMB ity prevailed over every hig other consideration both

withsculptor and architect.

This gave their works a unity, and also, we must frankly admit,

a constant uniformity of invention and execution; the very derogations from the determining _ principle which we seem to note in them prove to be a result and a confirmation of it, when we study them attentively. If indeed the tomb and the temple, supplying the same demands, consist on the whole of the same elements as the palace, it was nevertheless essential that they should be arranged to suit the individual conditions of posthumous existence and of FIG. 21.—BRINGING CORN TO THE GRINDER, divine life Each contain- TREADING AND WINNOWING, IN THE TOMB OF TI.

ed a personal dwelling, rooms for guests or slaves, store-rooms, and audience-chambers; but whereas the god consented to receive his priests and to show himself sometimes to the people, the dead person was wholly inaccessible, and never again appeared in public, when the hour of his entry into his +

private apartments was past.

The sanctuary was accordingly so placed that it communicated with the outside world, and that the living could enter it easily on prescribed occasions; the vault, on the other hand, was never opened again after the corpse had been placed in it, and soon, to render the dead more completely inaccessible, the body was placed underground, at the end of a passage or at the bottom of a well which was subsequently filled up to the level of the soil. Thenceforth, whereas the temple inhabited % by t FIG. 22.—SLAUGHTER OF CATTLE, IN THE being whose nature did not TOMB OF TI, debar him from official intercourse with the world, tended to increase in size and to expand in the sunlight, the tomb, shunning the light of day, gradually diminished its points of external contact, and ended by displaying only a narrow facade, a roughly hewn panel, the bay of a door, or a rect- : i angular orifice in

FIG. 23.—THE NOMES BRINGING OFFERINGS, AT EDFU. . (Phot. Beato.) the rock. During the process of this change, the common plan was modified. As the princely dwelling was converted, on the one hand into a sanctuary, on the other into a vault, the guest-chambers, store-houses, and reception-rooms were modified and adjusted to circumstances. Some of the store-rooms were relegated to the sides, and assimilating to some extent with the guest -chambers, they became, jointly with these, depdts for daily offerings, or chapels for the paredri. The reception rooms were then _transformed into hypostyle halls or courts echeloned in a line on the longitudinal axis of the building, and increasing in size in proportion to their distance from the Holy of Holies. Thus FIG. 24.—A WALL IN THE TEMPLE oF isis, at the worshippers of the god PHILA. (Phot. Beato.) no more enjoyed equal facilities of approach than the courtiers of Pharaoh; a few were admitted to the presence, many entered halls more or less close to him, as determined by the hierarchy, and the rest advanced no farther than the outer courts or the platform before the temple. A dead person of non-royal race, who had not a nation to adore him, but whose family and dependents were necessarily restricted, would have had no use for such vast spaces; a simple chapel sufficed for him, and three or four little rooms, rarely more, and often less, served him for storehouse, reception-rooms, and guest-chambers, without endangering his chances of immortality. When this point had been reached, the diversity between tomb and temple was so great, that all traces of a common origin seem to have been effaced, what likeness is there at a first glance between a monument such as that cf Khonsu (Fig. 18) or of Edfa, and the Theban hypogea of the Saite period? To perceive the analogy clearly, a long series of deductions and analyses would be requisite.

The difficulty is hardly less when we attempt to refer the decorations of these buildings to a single type; but here again the most extravagant divergencies may be explained by the nature of the personages concerned.

Whether gods or mummies, they were incapable of subsisting by their individual energy, and they would have died of starvation but for the daily intervention of the living. The latter accordingly endowed them with appanages, or, if we prefer the term used in Mussulman oe : . . FIG. 25.—FULL FACE jurisprudence, dukaf, which kept them in good = srarvr, THE FEET case, as long as the revenues were applied (Museum, Cairo) to them. It was not very often, however, (Phot. E. Bragsch.)

that they profited long by their endowments.

Their descendants took them away after a certain number of years, or the family became extinct, and its heritage fell to strangers who repudiated the charges on the property; the founder, despoiled of his dues, suffered the slow tortures of starvation, before finally succumbing to that second death which definitively annihilated that remnant of vitality his first death had respected. The statuettes scattered in the rooms, and the scenes represented upon the walls of the tomb averted the danger, and the greater their number, the more certain he was to lack nothing, even if his actual possessions had been taken from him. Interminable processions of men and women simulated his houses, his ponds, his woods, his meadows, and brought the rents of their farms to him (Fig. 19), while the serfs and servants of his household, each occupied with his special work, manufactured its products for him eternally. Did he want bread? The field was ploughed before his eyes in simulacrum; the ripe grain fell under the sickle (Fig. 20); the corn was trodden out, winnowed, measured, and poured into the granary (Fig. 21); then the bakers ground it, baked the loaf, and presented it to him. Did he desire to eat meat? In other pictures, the bull was coupled with the cow, the calf was born, grew up, became an ox, fell into the hands of the butchers who cut its throat, caught the blood, skinnedand divided

¥IG. 20.—KULE FACE the carcase, choosing the best pieces for STATUE, WALKING. B . . (Museum, Cairo.) him (Fig. 22). The gods were less in danger (Phot. E Brugsch.) of that complete ruin which resulted in annihilation; when once their appanage had been apportioned, if some impious person appropriated it in the course of time, a benefactor duly appeared to repair the injury. Nevertheless, it was considered prudent to assign to them as to the dead, a fictitious domain to supplement the real one if needful; the Nomes were accordingly represented bringing their tribute (Fig. 23), and sometimes even barbarous peoples subject to Egypt. And as the gods could only be served by the Pharaoh or one of his family, on every occasion when the help of an inferior was not indispensable, we see around them on the walls only kings and queens, princes and princesses; these noble personages, however, were not obliged to perform the vulgar tasks imposed on the kinsfolk of dead persons. It appears that no effort was necessary to obtain all that was réquired in the — 9e.27.—searepstaTuRor ‘sphere in which they moved; objects 7#® PHARAOH mMyCERINUS.

M » Cairo. presented themselves all ready for use, (Phot, E. Breweh)

the ox decked for the holocaust, water, wine, milk, and oil poured for libation, the incense lighted for sacramental fumigation. Nothing could be less like the varied episodes of human life which abound in the hypogea than these monotonous functions of divine life; and yet the god who might have been suddenly on the verge of starvation by reason of some accident would only have had to cast his eyes around, and the imagery of the walls would have nourished him with delectable realities; in the temple as in the tomb the decoration had an important utilitarian function, and if the elements which composed the two differed materially, the intention which co-ordinated them and the conception from which they were deduced were one and the same.

Alms msistenee, ona utilitarian purpose . 234-23. StsNoie seea0e weighed heavily upon the independence (hascuin: Gan both of art and artist. The artist, obliged (Phot, E. Bragsch,) to think above all of the welfare of those for whom he was working, was not free to abandon himself to his inspiration, nor to diverge from the rules in which religion imprisoned him. Seeing that the statue was the body of a double, it was necessary, in order to attach this double to it, to reproduce not only the physiognomy and features of the model, but the bearing and the costume of his profession, to the end that in his state of death he should remain what fortune had made him here below; it had to be at once the portrait of an individual, and a type of the class to which he belonged. Scribes, artisans, FIG. 20.—GROUP OF PERSONS, - nobles, priests, Pharaohs, and

STANDING AND SITTING. ° ° (Museum, Cairo.) (Phot. E. Brugsch.) gods had each their prescribed

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FIG. 30.—STATUE WITH BODY-IN A SHEATH. (Museum, Cairo.)

formula, to which sculptors and painters were required to adhere faithfully, without, however, modifying the characteristic lines of the individual; some thirty positions were permitted: standing still (Fig. 25) or walking (Fig. 26), sitting (Fig. 27), kneeling, crouching, crawling, lying, with a hundred variations of costume, head-dress and insignia. Persons were represented facing the spectator squarely, so that a line drawn perpendicularly through the body always divided it into two equal portions, and this law of frontality was rigorously observed down to the last days of pagan Egypt. Mural decoration, by the nature of the episodes proper to it, admitted greater diversity; but here it is necessary to distinguish between that of tombs and that of temples. It both cases the moment chosen is that of the performance of the act which was to produce the result enjoined by dogma; but whereas in the temple the scene, enacted by gods and Pharaohs, rarely required more than three or four persons, always of the same kind, in the tomb all Egypt played its part, men, beasts and things, and the number of the participants had no other limits than those of the surface to be covered. The result in the basreliefs of the temple was a uniformity of composition and attitude almost equal to that of the statues.