229. Plan of the Temple of Elephantiné
396
230. View in perspective of the Temple of Elephantiné
397
231. Longitudinal section of the Temple of Elephantiné
398
232. Temple of Amenophis III. at Eilithyia
401
233. Temple of Amenophis III. at Eilithyia; longitudinal section
403
234. The speos at Addeh
406
235. The speos at Addeh; longitudinal section
406
236. Plan of speos at Beit-el-Wali
407
237. Longitudinal section of the speos at Beit-el-Wali
407
238. Plan of the hemispeos of Gherf-Hossein
408
239. Gherf-Hossein; longitudinal section
409
240. Plan of the hemispeos of Derri
409
241. Longitudinal section; Derri
409
242. Façade of the smaller temple at Ipsamboul
411
243. Plan of the smaller temple
413
244. Perspective of the principal Chamber in the smaller temple
413
245. Longitudinal section of the smaller temple
413
413
247. Perspective of the principal Hall in the Great Temple
414
248. Façade of the Great Temple at Ipsamboul
415
249. Longitudinal section of the Great Temple
417
250. Dayr-el-Bahari
419
251. Restoration in perspective of Dayr-el-Bahari
423
252. The ruins on the Island of Philæ
431
253. The battle against the Khetas, Luxor
436
254. Rameses II. returning in triumph from Syria
437
255. The goddess Anouké suckling Rameses II., Beit-el-Wali
441
i
INTRODUCTION.
I.
The successful interpretation of the ancient writings of Egypt,
Chaldæa, and Persia, which has distinguished our times, makes it
necessary that the history of antiquity should be rewritten. Documents
that for thousands of years lay hidden beneath the soil, and
inscriptions which, like those of Egypt and Persia, long offered
themselves to the gaze of man merely to excite his impotent curiosity,
have now been deciphered and made to render up their secrets for
the guidance of the historian. By the help of those strings of
hieroglyphs and of cuneiform characters, illustrated by paintings and
sculptured reliefs, we are enabled to separate the truth from the
falsehood, the chaff from the wheat, in the narratives of the Greek
writers who busied themselves with those nations of Africa and Asia
which preceded their own in the ways of civilization. Day by day, as
new monuments have been discovered and more certain methods of
reading their inscriptions elaborated, we have added to the
knowledge left us by Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, to our
acquaintance with those empires on the Euphrates and the Nile
which were already in old age when the Greeks were yet struggling to
emerge from their primitive barbarism.
Even in the cases of Greece and Rome, whose histories are supplied
in their main lines by their classic writers, the study of hitherto
neglected writings discloses many new and curious
ii
details. The energetic search for ancient inscriptions, and the
scrupulous and ingenious interpretation of their meaning, which we
have witnessed and are witnessing, have revealed to us many
interesting facts of which no trace is to be found in Thucydides or
Xenophon, in Livy or Tacitus; enabling us to enrich with more than
one feature the picture of private and public life which they have
handed down to us. In the effort to embrace the life of ancient times
as a whole, many attempts have been made to fix the exact place in it
occupied by art, but those attempts have never been absolutely
successful, because the comprehension of works of art, of plastic
creations in the widest significance of that word, demands an amount
of special knowledge which the great majority of historians are
without; art has a method and language of its own, which obliges
those who wish to learn it thoroughly to cultivate their taste by
frequenting the principal museums of Europe, by visiting distant
regions at the cost of considerable trouble and expense, by perpetual
reference to the great collections of engravings, photographs, and
other reproductions which considerations of space and cost prevent
the savant from possessing at home. More than one learned author
has never visited Italy or Greece, or has found no time to examine
their museums, each of which contains but a small portion of the
accumulated remains of antique art. Some connoisseurs do not even
live in a capital, but dwell far from those public libraries, which often
contain valuable collections, and sometimes—when they are not
packed away in cellars or at the binder's—allow them to be studied by
the curious.[2] The study of art, difficult enough in itself, is thus rendered still more arduous by the obstacles which are thrown in its
way. The difficulty of obtaining materials for self-improvement in this
direction affords the true explanation of the absence, in modern
histories of antiquity, of those laborious researches which have led to
such great results since Winckelmann founded the science of
archæology as we know it. To take the case of Greece, many learned
writers have in our time attempted to retrace its complete history—
England, Germany, and France have each contributed works which,
by various merits, have conquered the favour of Europe. But of all
these works the only one which betrays any deep study of Greek art,
and treats it with taste and
iii
competence, is that of M. Ernest Curtius; as for Mr. Grote, he has
neither a theoretic knowledge of art, nor a feeling for it. Here and
there, indeed, where he cannot avoid it, he alludes to the question,
but in the fewest and driest phrases possible. And yet Greece,
without its architects, its sculptors, and its painters, without in fact its
passion for beautiful form, a passion as warm and prolific as its love
for poetry, is hardly Greece at all.
Much disappointment is thus prepared for those who, without the
leisure to enter deeply into detail, wish to picture to themselves the
various aspects of the ancient world. They are told of revolutions, of
wars and conquests, of the succession of princes; the mechanism of
political and civil institutions is explained to them; "literature," we are
told, "is the expression of social life," and so the history of literature is
written for us. All this is true enough, but there is another truth which
seems to be always forgotten, that the art of a people is quite as clear
an indication of their sentiments, tastes, and ideas, as their literature.
But on this subject most historians say little, contenting themselves
with the brief mention of certain works and proper names, and with
the summary statement of a few general ideas which do not even
possess the merit of precision. And where are we to find the
information thus refused? Europe possesses several histories of
Greek and Roman literature, written with great talent and eloquence,
such as the work, unhappily left unfinished, of Ottfried Müller; there
are, too, excellent manuals, rich in valuable facts, such as those of
Bernhardy, Baehr, and Teuffel; but where is there, either in England,
in France, or in Germany, a single work which retraces, in sufficient
detail, the whole history of antique art, following it throughout its
progress and into all its transformations, from its origin to its final
decadence, down to the epoch when Christianity and the barbaric
invasions put an end to the ancient forms of civilization and prepared
for the birth of the modern world, for the evolution of a new society
and of a new art?
To this question our neighbours may reply that the Geschichte der
bildenden Kunst of Carl Schnaase[3] does all that we ask. But that work has one great disadvantage for those who are not
iv
Germans. Its great bulk will almost certainly prevent its ever finding a
translator, while it makes it very tedious reading to a foreigner. It
must, besides, be very difficult, not to say impossible, for a single
writer to treat with equal competence the arts of Asia, of Greece, and
of Rome, of the Middle Ages and of modern times. As one might have
expected, all the parts of such an extensive whole are by no means
of equal value, and the chapters which treat of antique art are the
least satisfactory. Of the eight volumes of which the work consists,
two are devoted to ancient times, and, by general acknowledgment,
they are not the two best. They were revised, indeed, for the second
edition, by two colleagues whom Herr Schnaase called in to his
assistance; oriental art by Carl von Lützow, and that of Greece and
Rome by Carl Friedrichs. But the chapters in which Assyria,
Chaldæa, Persia, Phœnicia, and Egypt are discussed are quite
inadequate. No single question is exhaustively treated. Instead of
well-considered personal views, we have vague guesses and
explanations which do nothing to solve the many problems which
perplex archæologists. The illustrations are not numerous enough to
be useful, and, in most cases, they do not seem to have been taken
from the objects themselves. Those which relate to architecture,
especially, have been borrowed from other well known works, and
furnish therefore no new elements for appreciation or discussion.
Finally, the order adopted by the author is not easily understood. For
reasons which have decided us to follow the same course, and which
we will explain farther on, he takes no account of the extreme east, of
China and Japan; but then, why begin with India, which had no
relations with the peoples on the shores of the Mediterranean until a
very late date, and, so far as art was concerned, rather came under
their influence than brought them under its own?
The fact is that Schnaase follows a geographical order, which is very
confusing in its results. To give but one example of its absurdity, he
speaks of the Phœnicians before he has said a word of Egypt; now,
we all know that the art of Tyre and Sidon was but a late reflection
from that of Egypt; the workshops of those two famous ports were
mere factories of cheap Egyptian art objects for exportation.
Again, the first part of Herr Schnaase's work is already seventeen
years old, and how many important discoveries have taken place
v
since 1865? Those of Cesnola and Schliemann, for instance, have
revealed numberless points of contact and transmission between one
phase of antique art and another, which were never thought of twenty
years ago. The book therefore is not "down to date." With all the
improvements which a new edition might introduce, that part of it
which deals with antiquity can never be anything but an abridgment
with the faults inherent in that kind of work. It could never have the
amplitude of treatment or the originality which made Winckelmann's
History of Art and Ottfried Müller's Manual of Artistic Archæology so
successful in their day.[4]
Winckelmann's History of Art among the Ancients, originally published
in 1764, is one of those rare books which mark an epoch in the
history of the human intellect. The German writer was the first to
formulate the idea, now familiar enough to cultivated intelligences,
that art springs up, flourishes, and decays, with the society to which it
belongs; in a word, that it is possible to write
vi
its history.[5] This great savant, whose memory Germany holds in honour as the father of classic archæology, was not content with
stating a principle: he followed it through to its consequences; he
began by tracing the outlines of the science which he founded, and
he never rested till he had filled them in. However, now that a century
has passed away since it appeared, his great work, which even yet is
never opened without a sentiment of respect, marks a date beyond
which modern curiosity has long penetrated. Winckelmann's
knowledge of Egyptian art was confined to the pasticcios of the
Roman epoch, and to the figures which passed from the villa of
Hadrian to the museum of Cardinal Albani. Chaldæa and Assyria,
Persia and Phœnicia, had no existence for him; even Greece as a
whole was not known to him. Her painted vases were still hidden in
Etruscan and Campanian cemeteries; the few which had found their
way to the light had not yet succeeded in drawing the attention of
men who were preoccupied over more imposing manifestations of the
Greek genius. Nearly all Winckelmann's attention was given to the
works of the sculptors, upon which most of his comprehensive
judgments were founded; and yet, even in regard to them, he was not
well-informed. His opportunities of personal inspection were confined
to the figures, mostly of unknown origin, which filled the Italian
galleries. The great majority of these formed part of the crowd of
copies which issued from the workshops of Greece, for some three
centuries or more, to embellish the temples, the basilicas, and the
public baths, the villas and the palaces of the masters of the world. In
the very few instances in which they were either originals or copies
executed with sufficient care to be fair representations of the original,
they never dated from an earlier epoch than that of Praxiteles,
Scopas, and Lysippus. Phidias and Alcamenes, Pæonius and
Polycletus, the great
vii
masters of the fifth century, were only known to the historian by the
descriptions and allusions of the ancient authors.
In such a case as this the clearest and most precise of verbal
descriptions is of less value than any fragment of marble upon which
the hand of the artist is still to be traced. Who would then have
guessed that the following generation would have the opportunity of
studying those splendid groups of decorative sculpture whose close
relation to the architecture of certain famous temples has taught us
so much? Who in those days dreamt of looking at, still less of
drawing, the statues in the pediments and sculptured friezes of the
Parthenon, of the Thesæum, of the temples at Ægina, at Phigalia, or
at Olympia? Now if Winckelmann was ignorant of these, the real
monuments of classic perfection, it follows that he was hardly
competent to recognise and define true archaism or to distinguish the
works of sculpture which bore the marks of the deliberate, eclectic,
and over-polished taste of the critical epochs. He made the same
mistake in speaking of architecture. It was always, or nearly always,
by the edifices of Rome and Italy, by their arrangement and
decoration, that he pretended to explain and judge the architecture of
Greece.
But Winckelmann rendered a great service to art by founding a
method of study which was soon applied by Zoëga[6] and by Ennio Quirino Visconti,[7] to the description of the works which filled public and private galleries, or were being continually discovered by
excavation. These two savants classified a vast quantity of facts;
thanks to their incessant labours, the lines
viii
of the master's rough sketch were accented and corrected at more
than one point; the divisions which he had introduced into his picture
were marked with greater precision; the groups which he had begun
to form were rendered more coherent and compact; their features
became more precise, more distinct, and more expressive. This
progress was continuous, but after the great wars of the Revolution
and the Empire its march became much more rapid, and the long
peace which saw the growth of so rich a harvest of talent, was also
marked by a great increase in the energy with which all kinds of
historical studies were prosecuted.
But the widest, as well as the most sudden, enlargement of the
horizon was due to a rapid succession of discoveries, some the result
of persevering searches and lucky excavations, others rendered
possible by feats of induction which almost amounted to genius. It
seemed as though a curtain were drawn up, and, behind the rich and
brilliant scenery of Græco-Roman civilization, the real ancient world,
the world of the East, the father of religions and of useful inventions,
of the alphabet and of the plastic arts, were suddenly revealed to us.
The great work which was compiled by the savants who
accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt first introduced the antiquities of
that country to us, and not long afterwards Champollion discovered
the key to the hieroglyphics, and thus enabled us to assign to the
monuments of the country at least a relative date.
A little later Layard and Botta freed Nineveh from the ruins of its own
buildings, and again let in the light upon ancient Assyria. But
yesterday we knew nothing beyond the names of its kings, and yet it
sprang again to the day, its monuments in marvellous preservation,
its history pictured by thousands of figures in relief and narrated by
their accompanying inscriptions. These did not long keep their secrets
to themselves, and their interpretation enables us to classify
chronologically the works of architecture and sculpture which have
been discovered.
The information thus obtained was supplemented by careful
exploration of the ruins in Babylonia, lower Chaldæa, and Susiana.
These had been less tenderly treated by time and by man than the
remains of Nineveh. The imposing ruins of the palace at Persepolis
and of the tombs of the kings, had been known for nearly two
centuries, but only by the inadequate
ix
descriptions and feeble drawings of early travellers. Ker-Porter,
Texier, and Flandrin provided us with more accurate and
comprehensive descriptions, and, thanks to their careful copies of the
writings upon the walls of those buildings, and upon the inscribed
stones of Persia and Media, Eugène Burnouf succeeded in
reconstructing the alphabet of Darius and Xerxes.
Thus, to the toils of artists and learned men, who examined the
country from the mountains of Armenia to the low and marshy plains
of Susiana, and from the deserts which border the Euphrates to the
rocks of Media and Persia, and to the philologists who deciphered the
texts and classified the monumental fragments which had travelled so
far from the scene of their creation, we owe our power to describe,
upon a sound basis and from authentic materials, the great
civilisation which was developed in Western A