This was perceived by Goethe. In art, as in natural science, he divined
beforehand some of the discoveries of our century by the innate force of
his genius. He was not surprised by the discovery that the temples of
classic Sicily were painted in brilliant tones, which concealed the surface of
their stone and accentuated the leading lines of their architecture. He was
one of the first to accept the views of Hittorf and to proclaim that the
architects who had found traces of colours upon the mouldings of Greek
buildings were not deceiving themselves and others.
We borrow these expressions from M. Ch. Blanc, who, when in Egypt, was
very much struck with this phenomenon. "Those villages which approach in
colour to that Nile mud of which they are composed, hardly stand out at all
against the background, unless that be the sky itself or those sunny rocks
which reflect the light in such a fashion that they fatigue the most
accustomed eyes. I notice here, as I did in Greece, at Cape Sunium, that
cupolas and round towers have their modelling almost destroyed by the
strong reflections." ( Voyage de la Haute Égypte, 1876, p. 114).
Wilkinson thought there was always a layer of stucco, even upon the
beautiful granite of the obelisks ( Manners and Customs of the Ancient
Egyptians, 2nd ed., 1878, vol. ii. p. 286.) His statement must be treated
with great respect. During his long sojourn in Egypt he examined the
remains of the ancient civilisation with great care and patience, but yet we
think his opinion upon this point must be accepted with some reserve.
There are in the Louvre certain sarcophagi and other objects in hard stone,
upon which traces of colour are clearly visible on the sunk beds of the
figures and hieroglyphics, while not the slightest vestige of anything of the
kind is to be found upon the smooth surface around those carvings. But it
is certain that granite was often stuccoed over. Mariette has verified that it
was so on the obelisk of Hatasu at Thebes; both from the inscription and
the appearance of the monument itself he came to the conclusion that it
had been gilded from top to bottom, and that the gold had been laid upon a
coat of white stucco. "The plain surface," he says, "alone received this
costly decoration. It had been left slightly rough, but the hieroglyphs, which
had their beds most carefully polished, preserved the colour and surface of
the granite." ( Itinéraire, p. 178.) As for buildings of limestone or sandstone,
like the temples of Thebes, they are always coated.
Apropos of the Temple of Khons, Jollois and Devilliers ( Description
générale de Thébes, ch. ix.) remark: "It was upon this coat that the
hieroglyphs and figures were sculptured.... The contour of the figures is
sometimes marked upon the stone beneath, because the depth of the
cutting is greater than the thickness of the stucco."
" Conférence sur l'Histoire des Âmes dans l'Égypte ancienne, d'après les
Monuments du Musée du Louvre," in the Bulletin hebdomadaire de
l'Association scientifique de France, No. 594. M. Maspero has often and
exhaustively treated this subject, especially in his numerous lectures at the
Collège de France. Those lectures afforded the material for the remarkable
paper in the Journal asiatique entitled, " Étude sur quelques Peintures et
sur quelques Textes relatifs aux Funérailles" (numbers for May, June,
1878, for December-June, and November, December, 1879, and May-
June, 1880). These articles have been republished in a single volume with
important corrections and additions (Maisonneuve, 1880).
Or ba.—Ed.
Conférence, p. 381. Mr. Herbert Spencer, in the first chapters of his
Principles of Sociology, has given a curious and plausible explanation of
how this conception of a double was formed. He finds its origin chiefly in
the phenomena of sleep, of dreams, and of the faintness caused by
wounds or illness. He shows how these more or less transitory
suspensions of animation led men to suppose that death was nothing but a
prolonged interruption of life. He also thinks that the actual shadow cast by
a man's body contributed to the formation of that belief. But had it no other
elements which belonged to the general disposition of humanity in those
early periods of intellectual life? Into that question we cannot enter here
further than to say that Mr. Spencer's pages make us acquainted with
numerous facts which prove that the beliefs in question were not confined
to a single race, but were common to all humanity.
This expression, which is very common in the Egyptian texts, seems to
have made a great impression upon the Greek travellers. The following
passage of Diodorus is well known: "This refers to the beliefs of the
natives, who look upon the life upon earth as a thing of minor importance,
but set a high value upon those virtues of which the memory is
perpetuated after death. They call their houses hotels, in view of the short
time they have to spend in them, while they call their tombs their eternal
dwellings" (i. 51).
The dead were put under the protection of, and, as it were, combined with,
Osiris; they talked of the Osiris so and so in naming one who was dead.
Εἴδωλα καμόντων ( Il. xxiii. 72; Od. xi. 476; xxiv. 14).
This belief is clearly stated in a passage from Cicero quoted by Fustel:
"Sub terrâ censebant reliquam vitam agi mortuorum" ( Tusc. i. 16). This
belief was so strong that it subsisted even after the universal establishment
of the custom of burning the bodies of the dead.
Texts to this effect abound. Fustel brought the more remarkable of them
together in his Cité antique (p. 14). We shall be content with quoting three:
"Son of Peleus," said Neoptolemus, "take this drink which is grateful to the
dead; come and drink this blood" (Hecuba, 536). Electra says when she
pours a libation: "This drink has penetrated the earth; my father has
received it" (Choephorœ, 162). And listen to the prayer of Orestes to his
dead father: "Oh my father, if I live thou shalt have rich banquets; if I die
thou wilt have no portion of those smoking feasts which nourish the dead"
(Choephorœ, 482-484). Upon the strange persistence of this belief, traces
of which are still found in Eastern Europe, in Albania, in Thessaly, and
Epirus, the works of Heuzey ( Mission archéologique de Macédoine, p.
156), and Albert Dumont ( le Balkan et l'Adriatique, pp. 354-356), may be
consulted. Some curious details relating to the funeral feasts of the
Chinese are to be found in the Comptes rendus de l'Académie des
Inscriptions, 1877, p. 325. There are some striking points of resemblance
between the religion of China and that of ancient Egypt; in both one and
the other the same want of power to develop may be found. Taking them
as a whole, both the Chinese and the Egyptians failed to emerge from the
condition of fetichism.
In the eleventh book of the Odyssey it is only after "they have drunk deep
draughts of black blood" that the shades are capable of recognising
Ulysses, of understanding what he says and answering. The blood they
swallowed restored their intelligence and powers of thought.
The speeches of the Greek orators are full of proofs that these beliefs had
a great hold upon the popular mind, even as late as the time of
Demosthenes. In contested cases of adoption they always laid great stress
upon the dangers which would menace the city if a family was allowed to
become extinct for want of precautions against the failure of the hereditary
line; there would then be some neglected tomb where the dead never
received the visits of gift-bringing friends, a neglect which would be visited
upon the city as a whole as the accomplice in such abandonment. Such an
argument and others like it may not seem to us to be of great judicial
value, but the talent of an Isæus understood how to make it tell with an
audience, or we should not find it so often repeated in his pleadings (see
G. Perrot, L'Éloquence politique et judiciare à Athènes. Les Précurseurs de
Demosthène, pp. 359-364).
Seventh edition, Hachette, 18mo., 1879.
Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his ingenious and subtle analysis of primitive ideas
draws our attention to their frequent inconsistencies and even positive
contradictions; but he shows us at the same time that the most highly
civilised races in these modern days admit and combine ideas which are
logically quite as irreconcilable as those which seem to us so absurdly
inconsistent when we think of the beliefs of the ancients or of savage
races. Custom renders us insensible to contradictions which we should
perceive at once were we removed to a distance from them. ( The
Principles of Sociology, vol. i. pp. 119, 185).
The texts also bear witness to the ideas with which the complicated
processes of embalming were undertaken. See P. Pierret, Le Dogme de la
la Résurrection, &c., p. 10. "It was necessary that no member, no
substance, should be wanting at the final summons; resurrection depended
on that." " Thou countest thy members which are complete and intact. "
(Egyptian funerary text.) "Arise in To-deser (the sacred region in which the
renewal of life is prepared), thou august and coffined mummy. Thy bones
and thy substance are re-united with thy flesh, and thy flesh is again in its
place; thy head is replaced upon thy neck, thy heart is ready for thee."
(Osirian statue in the Louvre.) The dead took care to demand of the gods
" that the earth should not bite him, that the soil should not consume him."
(Mariette, Feuilles d'Abydos.) The preservation of the body must therefore
have been an object of solicitude at the earliest times, but the art of
embalming did not attain perfection until the Theban period. Under the
ancient empire men were content with comparatively simple methods.
Mariette says that "more examples would have to be brought together than
he had been able to discover before the question of mummification under
the ancient empire could be decided. It is certain, first, that no authentic
piece of mummy cloth from that period is now extant; secondly, that the
bones found in the sarcophagi have the brownish colour and the
bituminous smell of mummies.
"Not more than five or six inviolate sarcophagi have been found. On each
of these occasions the corpse has been discovered in the skeleton state.
And as for linen, nothing beyond a little dust upon the bottom of the
sarcophagus, which might be the débris of many other things than of a
linen shroud." ( Les Tombes de l'Ancien Empire, p. 16.)
Passalacqua gives the following description of the mummy of a young
woman which he discovered at Thebes: "Her hair and the rotundity and
surprising regularity of her form showed me that she had been a beauty in
her time, and that she had died in the flower of her youth." He then gives a
minute description of her condition and ornaments, and concludes by
saying that "the peculiar beauty of the proportions of this mummy, and its
perfect preservation, had so greatly impressed the Arabs themselves that
they had exhumed it more than once to show to their wives and
neighbours." ( Catalogue raisonné et historique des Antiquités découvertes
en Égypte, 8vo. 1826.)
Rhind describes several mummy-pits in the necropolis of Thebes which
receive the water of the Nile by infiltration; but, as he himself remarks, this
is because those who dug them did not foresee the gradual raising of the
valley, and, consequently, of the level attained in recent ages by the waters
of the Nile. It is doubtless only within the last few centuries that the water
has penetrated into these tombs. ( Thebes, its Tombs and their Tenants, p.
153.)
Maspero, Conférence, p. 381.
Maspero, Notes sur différentes Points de Grammaire et d'Histoire, p. 155.
(In the Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l'Archéologie
Égyptienne et Assyrienne, vol. i.)
Jars, which seem to have been once filled with water, are found in many
tombs of all epochs. Different kinds of dates are also found, together with
the fruit of the sycamore, corn, cakes, &c. See the Catalogue of
Passalacqua, pp. 123, 151, and elsewhere. Quarters of meat have also
been found in them, which are easily recognised by their well-preserved
bones.
Maspero, Études sur quelques Peintures funéraires, in the Journal
Asiatique, May-June, 1880, p. 387, et seq.
In one of the great inscriptions at Beni-Hassan, recently translated anew
both by M. Maspero and Professor Birch, Chnoumhotep speaks thus: "I
caused to prosper the name of my father. I completed the existing temples
of the Ka. I served my statues at the great temples. I sacrificed to them
their food, bread, beer, water, vegetables, pure herbs. My priest has
verified (I chose a priest for the Ka,—Maspero). I procured them from the
irrigation of my work-people (I made him master of fields and slaves,—
Maspero). I ordered the sepulchral offerings of bread, beer, cattle, fowl, in
all the festivals of Karneter, at the festivals of the beginning of the year, the
opening of the year, increase of the year, diminution of the year (little
year,—Brugsch and Maspero), close of the year, at the great festival, at the
festival of the great burning, at the festival of the lesser burning, the five
intercalary days, at the festival of bread making (of the entry of grain,—
Maspero) at the twelve monthly and half monthly festivals, all the festivals
on the earth (plain), terminating on the hill (of Anubis). But should my
sepulchral priest or men conduct them wrongly may he not exist, nor his
son in his place."—Birch, Records of the Past, vol. xii. p. 71.—Ed.
In each opening of the serdab in the tomb of Ti, at Sakkarah, people,
probably relatives of the deceased, are represented in the act of burning
incense in a contrivance which resembles in form the θυμιατήριον of the
Greek monuments. (Mariette, Notice des principaux Monuments de
Boulak, p. 27, note 1.)
See the paper by M. Maspero upon the great inscription at Siout, which
has preserved for us a contract between Prince Hapi-Toufi and the priests
of Ap-Môtennou, by which offerings should be regularly made to the
prince's statue, which was deposited in a temple at Siout. ( Transactions of
the Society of Biblical Archæology, vol. vii. pp. 1-32.)
It was the same in the case of a still older king, Seneferu, the founder of
the fourth dynasty. (De Rougé, Recherches sur les Monuments que l'on
peut attribuer aux six premières Dynasties de Manéthon, p. 41.)
Tombes de l'Ancien Empire, p. 87.
Herodotus, iv. 71, 72.
In a few rare cases the objects destined for the nourishment of the double
are represented in the round instead of being painted upon the wall. In the
tomb of the personage called Atta, a wooden table, supporting terra-cotta
vases and plucked geese carved in calcareous stone, has been found.
(Mariette, Tombes de l'Ancien Empire, p. 17.) The vases must have been
full of water when they were placed in the tomb; the stone geese may be
compared to the papier-mâché loaves of the modern stage.
All Egyptian collections contain coffers of painted wood, often decorated in
the most brilliant fashion, which served to hold these statues when they
were placed in the tomb. The size and the richness of their ornament
depended upon the wealth of the deceased for who they were made.
Pietschmann ( Der Egyptische Fetischdienst, &c., p. 155), has well grasped
the character and significance of these statuettes. Conf. Pierret,
Dictionnaire d'Archéologie égyptienne, vol. v. See also, in connection with
the personality attributed to them and to the services which were expected
from them, a note by M. Maspero, Sur une Tablette appartenant à M.
Rogers. ( Recueil de Travaux, vol. ii. p. 12.)
De Rougé, Mémoire sur les Monuments des six premières Dynasties (p.
80 et seq. ). Conf. Maspero, Histoire Ancienne, pp. 88-92.
See Mariette, Tombes de l'Ancien Empire, p. 88.
This word, σύριγξ (flute), was employed by the Greeks to designate those
long subterranean galleries cut in the rock of the necropolis at Thebes, in
the valley called the Valley of the Kings; modern egyptologists apply it in a
more general sense to all tombs cut deeply into the flanks of the mountain.
For the reason which led the Greeks to adopt a term which now seems
rather fantastic, see Pierret, Dictionnaire d'Archéologie égyptienne. The
chief passages in ancient authors in which the term is applied either to the
subterranean excavations of Egypt or to other galleries of the same kind,
are brought together by Jomard in the third volume of the Description
( Antiquités, vol. iii. pp. 12-14).
Journal asiatique, May-June, 1880, pp. 419, 420.
We borrow the translation of this inscription, as well as the reflections
which precede it, from M. Maspero ( Conférence, p. 382). According to M.
de Rougé, it dates from about the twelfth dynasty. An invocation of the
same kind is to be found in another epigraph of the same period, the
inscription of Amoni-Amenemhaït, hereditary prince of the nome of Meh, at
Beni-Hassan. See Maspero, La Grande Inscription de Beni-Hassan, p. 171
( Recueil de Travaux, etc., vol. i. 4to.).
Maspero, Conférence, p. 282.
Among the cemeteries of the right bank we may mention that of Tell-el-
Amarna; where the tombs would have been too far from the city had they
been dug in the Libyan Chain. The cemeteries