YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY From the Library of ANNIE BURR JENNINGS the gift of ANNIE BURR LEWIS COMPOSITE PAPYRUS CAPITAL. HIBIS TEMPLE XXX DYNASTY EIGHTH ROOM THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS N EW YORK M G M X I 1 I COPYRIGHT, NOVEMBER, ign BY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART ^11 i CONTENTS PAGE Table of Contents . vii List of Illustrations ix Prefatory Note xv The Arrangement of the Egyptian Rooms xvii Plan of the Egyptian Rooms xviii Chronological Table xxi The First Room i The Second Room 19 The Third Room 33 The Fourth and Fifth Rooms 41 The Sixth and Seventh Rooms .... 79 The Eighth Room 123 The Ninth Room 139 The Tenth Room . 161 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Composite Papyrus Capital. Hibis Temple. XXX Dynasty . . . Frontispiece. PAGE Fig. I. The First Egyptian Room. 2 Fig. 2. Flint implements of the Palaeolithic Period . . 6 Fig. 3. Neolithic flint implements. Pre-dynas- tic Period . . . 7 Fig. 4. Pre-dynastic decorated pottery . . 9 Fig. 5. Pre-dynastic painted figurines . 11 Fig. 6. Supports for a couch, in the form of bull's legs. I to II Dynasty. From Abydos . .... 13 Fig. 7. Some types of stone vases from a II Dynasty tomb at Sakkara . 15 Fig. 8. Site of the tomb of Ra-em-ka at Sakkara with the Step Pyramid beyond, from the north . -25 Fig. 9. Offering-chamber of the tomb of Ra-em- ka, at Sakkara. Photograph taken in the process of its removal . . -25 listof illustrations Fig. 10. Fig. I L. Fig. 12. Fig. 13- Fig. 14. Fig. 15. Fig. 16. Fig. 17. Fig. 18. Fig. 19. Fig. 20. Fig. 21. Fig. 22. Fig. 23- Fig. 24. West wall of offering-chamber of Ra- em-ka . .... East wall of offering-chamber of Ra- em-ka ...... Netting of birds, from west wall of Ra- em-ka . . . . The Third Egyptian Room. Old King dom and Pre-middle Kingdom Block of Old Kingdom relief found re-used as building material in the pyramid of Amenemhat I, at Lisht West wall of the offering-chamber of Sekhemhathor, from Sakkara Detail of wall-relief of Sekhemhathor The Fourth Egyptian Room. Middle Kingdom ..... View of north pyramid at Lisht, with camp of the Expedition in the fore ground ..... The Fifth Egyptian Room. Middle Kingdom ..... Excavation of the temple of the south pyramid. Season 1908-1909. XII Dynasty ..... Granite altar of Amenemhat I. XII Dynasty ..... Burial chamber of Senbtes. XII Dy nasty ...... Pottery from the tomb of Senbtes. XII Dynasty ..... Jewelry of Senbtes. XII Dynasty PAGE 26 27 29 34 3637 39 424345 47 51 52 53 55 LIST OF illustrations Fig. 25. Girdle of Senbtes. XII Dynasty . 57 Fig. 26. Coffin of Ameny. X 1 1 Dynasty . 59 Fig. 27. Coffin of Nephthys. XII Dynasty . 59 Fig. 28. Canopic box of Senba, showing inner lid. XII Dynasty ... 61 Fig. 29. Canopic box of Senba, showing jars XII Dynasty . . . .61 Canopic jar of Kay. X Dynasty . 61 Wooden statuette of Senba. XII Dynasty . . . 63 Inner coffin of Nephthys. XII Dy nasty. ..... 67 Relief from the Temple of Mentu- hotep III at Deir el-Bahri. XI Dynasty ..... 70 Temple-relief of Amenemhat I. XII Dynasty . . . . .71 Temple-relief of Amenemhat I. XII Dynasty ..... 72 Limestone statuette-head of Amenem hat I. XII Dynasty ... 73 Temple relief from south pyramid at Lisht. XII Dynasty . 75 Osiride statue of Senusert I, and relief from enclosure wall of his pyramid. XII Dynasty .... 77 The Sixth Egyptian Room . . 80 Quartzite head of Akhenaten (head dress restored). XVIII Dynasty 85 Fig. 41. Small limestone group. XVIII Dy nasty . . . . .91 Fig. 30. Fig. 31- Fig. 32. Fig. 33- Fig. 34- Fig. 35- Fig. 36. Fig. 37- Fig. 38. Fig. 39. Fig. 40. list of illustrations PAGE Fig. 42. Ceiling from the palace of Amenhotep III, partially restored. XVIII Dy nasty . • . • • 97 Fig. 43. Head of a granite statue of Amon. Late XVIII Dynasty . . .101 Fig. 44. Relief from a memorial temple of Rameses I at Abydos. XIX Dy nasty ..... 103 Fig. 45. Detail from temple- relief of Rameses I, representing the union of Upper and Lower Egypt. XIX Dynasty. 105 Tomb chamber from Razigat. XIX- XX Dynasty .... 107 The excavations at the Palace of Amen hotep III. Season of 1910-191 1 . 109 Pottery from a royal tomb. Late XVIII Dynasty . . . m Floral necklace. Late XVIII Dy nasty 113 Inner coffin of Khonsu. XX Dynasty 117 The Eighth Egyptian Room . .124 Excavations at the Temple of Hibis in the Kharga Oasis. Season 1909- •9'0 . . . . 127 Sculptor's Model — Late Dynastic or Ptolemaic . . . 130 Sculptor's Model — Late Dynastic or Ptolemaic . . .130 Sculptor's Model Head. XXVI Dy nasty ,3, Portrait Head of XXVI Dynasty . 135 Fig. 46. Fig. 47- Fig. 48. Fig. 49. Fig.Fig.Fig. 50. 51-52. Fig. 53- Fig. 54- Fig. 55- Fig. 56. LIST OF illustrations PAGE Fig. 57. The Ninth Egyptian Room . .140 Fig. 58. Sculptured molding — Coptic. VI cen tury A. D. . . . .143 Fig. 59. Portrait panels from the Fayum, one in position on Mummy. II-III centuries, A. D. . . . . 145 Fig. 60. Mummy with Mask of a Woman named Artemidora. About 100 A. D 147 Fig. 61. Detail of Mummy with Mask of a woman named Artemidora. About 100 A. D 147 Capital from Monastery of St. Jeremias Vl-VIII century A. D. . .151 Basket capital from Bawit. VI cen tury A. D. . . . .153 Coptic Sculptured Friezes. V-VI I centuries A. D. . . . .155 Capital from Monastery of St. Jere mias. VI century A. D. . .157 Coptic Grave Stela. VI-VII century A. D 158 Fragment of a Sculptured Door Post. Coptic. VI century A. D. . . 159 The Tenth Egyptian Room . .162 Funerary Stela of XXVI Dynasty 165 The Tomb of Har Khebit before the removal of the Sarcophagus. Photographed by J. E. Quibell . 167 Fig. 62. Fig. 63. Fig. 64. Fig. 65. Fig. ee. Fig. 67. Fig.Fig.Fig. 68. 69. 70. PREFATORY NOTE THIS handbook is intended as a temporary one and is issued in order that a description of the rooms may be available when they are first opened for exhibition. In a year or more a slight readjustment of the Middle Kingdom and Empire rooms will be necessary on the completion of the adjoining new wing of the building, in which a few rooms are to be assigned to the development of this collection. When that is accomplished, it is the in tention of the department to issue its permanent catalogues and publications. The description of the First, Second, and Third Egyptian Rooms (Pre-Dynastic and Early-Dynastic Periods, and the Old Kingdom) has been written by Albert M. Lythgoe; that of the Fourth and Fifth Rooms (Middle Kingdom) by Arthur C. Mace; of the Sixth and Seventh Rooms (The Empire) by Herbert E. Winlock; and of the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Rooms (Late-Dynastic, Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods) by Caroline L. Ransom. THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS PLAN OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS THE method of arrangement followed in this series of rooms devoted to the illustration of ancient Egyptian art and civilization is a chronological one. In the First Egyptian Room are shown the earliest traces of man's occupation of the Nile Valley; in the Palaeolithic Period; the primitive beginnings of the civilization we now know as Egyptian, in the Neolithic or Pre-Dynastic Period; and the rapid development of that civilization under the earliest historical rulers of Egypt in the I and 1 1 dynasties. In the Second and Third Rooms, devoted to the Old Kingdom (HI to VI dynasties), may be seen the culmination of this development in the great period of archaic art, of which the sculpture is here illustrated by representative wall-reliefs from mastaba-tombs at Sak kara, while the constructive features of the period are represented by monolithic columns from pyramid- temples at Abusir and Sakkara. With the disintegration of the country following the the arrangement OF the rooms Old Kingdom comes a revival of its power again under the rulers of the Middle Kingdom (XI-XIII dynasties). The elaborate provision then made for the dead in the furnishing of the tomb is fully represented in the Fourth Egyptian Room, while the reversion which takes place in the art of this period to the style and motives of that of the Old Kingdom is shown, in the Fifth Egyptian Room, in a large series of painted relief-sculptures from the temple of Mentuhotep III at Thebes and the pyramid-temples of Amenemhat I and Senusert I at Lisht. After the occupation of Egypt by the Hyksos and their eventual expulsion, follows the period of Egypt's greatest power and artistic production — The Empire (XVII-XXI dynasties) — represented in the Sixth and Seventh Egyptian Rooms by characteristic ex amples of the sculpture and other arts. With the Eighth Egyptian Room we reach the Saite or Late-Dynastic Period — one of renaissance and finally, decline — followed by the period of Ptolemaic rule and the influence of Hellenistic art. The art of the succeeding period of the Roman con quest is illustrated in the Ninth Egyptian Room, where are included also examples of the Early- Christian art of Egypt down to the Arab conquest. Here the representation of Egyptian art comes to an end chronologically in this department of the museum. The Tenth Egyptian Room is devoted to the ex hibition of the various types of coffins of the Late- Dynastic and Ptolemaic Periods. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE THE chronological list of dynasties here given, down to and including the twenty-sixth dynasty, follows that of Breasted in his History of Egypt, with the exception of those marked by an asterisk*. *Pre-dynastic Period . Accession of Menes and Beginning of Dynasties First and Second Dynasties Third Dynasty Fourth Dynasty Fifth Dynasty Sixth Dynasty . Seventh and Eighth Dynasties Ninth and Tenth Dynasties Eleventh Dynasty Twelfth Dynasty Thirteenth to Seventeenth Dynasties ''Eighteenth Dynasty "Nineteenth Dynasty . Interim Twentieth Dynasty Twenty-first Dynasty Twenty-second Dynasty Twenty-third Dynasty 4000-3400 B. C. 3400 " 3400-2980 " 2980-2900 2900-27502750-2625 " 2625-2475 " 2475-2445 "^ 2445-2160 2160-2000 2000-1788 " 1 788-1 580 " 1 580-131 5 " 131 5-1205 " 1205-1200 1200-1090 1090- 945 945- 745 745- 718 " chronological table Twenty-fourth Dynasty Twenty-fifth Dynasty Twenty-sixth Dynasty Twenty-seventh and Twenty-eighth Dynasties .... Twenty-ninth Dynasty Thirtieth Dynasty Ptolemaic Period Roman Period . . . 30 B. C- 364 A. D. Byzantine Period Arab Conquest of Egypt . . 718- 712 B. . 712- 663 ' . 663- 525 ' 525- 338 ' . 398- 379 ' . 378- 341 ' 332- 30 " 30 B. C- 364 A. . 364- 640 ' . 640 • THE FIRST EGYPTIAN ROOM THE FIRST EGYPTIAN ROOM pre-dynastic period (about 4000-3400 B. c.) and early-dynastic period (i and 11 dynasties, about 3400-2980 B. C). ALTHOUGH Egypt, with its favorable climatic L\ and physical conditions, has continued to furnish ¦^ *¦ such abundant and well-preserved evidence on so many periods and phases of its ancient civilization, as yet it has yielded but little on that earliest period of its inhabitation of which any traces have been pre served, the pateolithic period. Whereas in various partsof Europe material has been found which illustrates to a considerable degree the life of palaeolithic man, as well as his remarkably developed artistic instincts as seen in the drawings left on the walls of his cave-dwellings, nothing of the period has yet come to light in Egypt more than the roughly worked flint implements which are found lying upon the surface of the desert, (cf. fig. 2.) From the action of the sun these have ac quired a blackened patina which is proof of the ages that they must have lain thus exposed, but not even an approximation can be made as to the length of time which separates the period of their use from that of the neolithic, or pre-dynastic period as it is termed. 3 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS Of this pre-dynastic civilization, however, the re searches of the past fifteen years have brought to light a mass of facts which, although they deal with a phase of Egypt's existence still remotely prehistoric, form a positive basis for deducing both the principal features of the life of the period and, what is of equal importance, its direct relation to that of the historical or dynastic period which follows. Up to the present time, however, it has not proved possible to determine the origin of this civilization. Whether the people who left in Egypt the palaeolithic remains were ancestors of the later neolithic race, or whether the latter were invaders who, on their arrival, found the valley already occupied by this more primi tive stock, is as yet unknown. So far, the earliest neo lithic culture found is everywhere met with at the same stage of development. Nowhere can the steps be discovered by which the neolithic could have been developed from the palaeolithic, and on the other hand there is no evidence to show that the more recent people found the others in possession of the country or mingled with them. The facts which can be accepted with complete cer tainty, however, are these: That at a date approxi mately five or six hundred years before the beginning of the first historical dynasty, about 3400 B. C. — that is to say, at about 4000 B.C. as closely as the date can be fixed — we find a race of people, related to the Arabs and Berbers, occupying the Nile valley from the Delta throughout Egypt proper into Nubia. This race, with a later admixture of Semites and a slight infusion of Negroid elements, forms the the first room foundation of the Egyptian people of the historic period. When we first meet these prehistoric people they al ready possessed many of theessential elements of civili zation and were skilled in many of the principal arts. Evidence of the fact that they had passed well beyond the primitive beginnings of many of these arts is seen on every hand in the material pre served in their graves. They had a knowledge of weaving and were able to manufacture cloths of linen of both coarser and finer varieties. They modeled by hand pottery which in some respects was hardly equaled in the later periods of Egyptian history, and they have given us the earliest known use of glaze in their manufacture of beads and similar ornaments. They had some knowledge of the working of metals, which at the beginning of the period was confined chiefly to the making of gold beads, copper fish-hooks, and other limited uses. Later in the period copper bracelets and anklets occur and, somewhat rarely, copper implements. Their weapons and implements were, with these later exceptions, of stone, and they fashioned flint knives, arrow heads, spear heads, and similar forms with a skill that is rarely equaled among the neolithic implements of European manufacture, (cf. fig. 3.) Of their habitations and settlements but scanty traces have remained, owing, no doubt, to the primitive type of construction they must have employed, but their cemeteries have been found on both banks of the Nile throughout Egypt and in Nubia, and it is from the investigation of these, first begun in 1896, that the evidence has been obtained 5 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS for reconstructing this earliest stage in the history of Egyptian civilization. Moreover, it is entirely from the material evidence afforded by them, in the absence of any contemporary inscriptional evidence, that our knowledge of the period is derived, for not only has FIG. 2 FLINT IMPLEMENTS OF THE PAL/EOLITHIC PERIOD an examination of many thousands of pre-dynastic graves proved the non-existence of any written lan guage previous to the beginning of the first historical dynasty, but the earliest inscribed monuments of the historical period are so primitive in character that they clearly mark the earliest stage in the process. The pre-dynastic grave is generally either oval or roughly rectangular in shape, and varies in size from about four feet in length and three feet in depth to some 6 THE FIRST ROOM eight or ten feet in length and six feet in depth. The bottom of the grave was first covered with a grass mat ting and then upon this the body was placed, clothed in linen garments and sometimes with an additional gar ment of skin, generally gazelle skin. The body was FIG. 3. NEOLITHIC FLINT IMPLEMENTS interred in the "contracted" or embryonic position, with the knees drawn up and the hands before the face, and was placed almost uniformly upon its left side, with the head toward the south and facing the west. No thought occurred of preserving the burial by artificial means, for this period preceded the introduction of the process of mummification among the Egyptians by at least fifteen hundred years, but owing to the natural 7 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS preservative qualities of the soil and climate they are sometimes found in a desiccated and almost perfect condition of preservation (compare the photographs in window-frame I), and thus have furnished complete evidence both for determining their physical and racial characteristics and for establishing beyond question their identification as the stock from which the histori cal Egyptian descends. In these pre-dynastic graves there were placed with the burial various implements and weapons of flint, articles of adornment, and pottery vases containing food and drink, which the religious belief of the period is thus seen to have considered as essential for the future welfare of the individual, as was the case in the grave furnishings provided in the later historical periods. The burial and the objects with it were then covered with one or more grass mattings and the grave was finally roofed with boughs covered with similar mat ting. Over the grave a mound of earth most probably was raised to mark its position, for in all succeeding periods some form of grave-superstructure is con sidered essential for that purpose. From the changes and developments of the types of pottery and other material contained in the graves they can be seen to follow through various successive' stages and can thus be assigned to several well-marked chronological divisions of the period, such as early, middle, and late pre-dynastic. Although at the time of their occupation of Egypt, these prehistoric settlers appear to have been scattered through the country without much attempt at centrali zation, it seems likely that they had gradually become 8 FIG. 4. PRE-DYNASTIC DECORATED POTTERY. A, B AND C WHITE-LINE DECORATION; D, E AND F RED-LINE DECORATION A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS grouped into a number of distinct communities or dis tricts, each with its local chieftain, from which the later "nomes" or provinces of the historical period may have been an outgrowth. As early as the middle pre-dynas tic period their decorated vases show the representa tions of boats bearing standards with various emblems which seem most probably to represent these various districts, in a manner corresponding to the nome- standards of the later periods. Certainly by the later part of the pre-dynastic period the process of centralization had gone a step farther and we know definitely from the earliest monuments of the historical period that these separate districts had become merged into two kingdoms — the North and the South — the union of which under Menes, the first historical king of Egypt, marks the beginning of the dynastic period, about 3400 B. C. The memory of this consolidation of the country survived throughout the whole period of Egyptian history and was perpetu ated, for example, in the royal titles " King of Upper and Lower Egypt" and "Uniter of the Two Lands," while it is represented pictorially on the temple-walls and on the thrones of royal statues by the union of the lily and the papyrus, the symbolical plants of Upper and Lower Egypt respectively. Our knowledge of the history of the early-dynastic period, which begins with the accession of Menes and extends to the end of the 1 1 dynasty, is far from complete and is based both on contemporary remains and on later documentary sources. Among the latter is the history of Egypt written by Manetho, a priest of the reign of Ptolemy I (305-285 B. C), in which he includes these 10 THE FIRST ROOM earliest kings and also arranges all the kings as far as they are known to him, from the time of Menes down, into thirty dynasties or royal houses. This arrange ment has been generally adopted by modern historians and, for purposes of convenience, these dynasties are now further grouped together under the name of a "period," "kingdom," or "empire." Fragments of royal annals which have survived, such as the so-called "Palermo stone" which is part of a record extending FIG. 5. PRE-DYNASTIC PAINTED FIGURINES from the earliest times down to the V dynasty, and the list of kings given in the "Turin papyrus," are our other principal documentary sources for this early period of the history. Previous to the investigations of the past fifteen years on early-dynastic sites, our knowledge of the con temporary material documents was so fragmentary that treatises on Egyptian art began practically with the consideration of the reigns of Khufu (or Cheops) and the other great pyramid-building kings of the IV dynasty, but the excavations of recent years have so added to our evidence on this side that a consistent idea II A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS of the main features of their civilization has now become possible. Of primary importance was the discovery and investigation of the tombs of the kings of the I and 1 1 dynasties at Abydos, near which the early capitol is supposed to have been situated, at a city named This, while the further excavation of provincial cemeteries of the same period has likewise added many other facts of importance. It is now clear that with the very beginning of the I dynasty and the consolidation of the country under Menes a period of rapid development begins in the material civilization of the country. The constructive features of the early-dynastic tombs exhibit a marked difference over the simple, earlier graves of the pre- dynastic period. We find, first, that at the beginning of the I dynasty the graves are lined with sun-dried brick, while they are roofed with wood or roughly worked slabs of limestone. The tombs increase in size, wooden roofs become impracticable because of the in creased span necessary, and the corbeled vault is ac cordingly first introduced as a feature of Egyptian construction. The "contracted" position of the burial itself follows the custom of the earlier pre-dynastic period, and, in fact, continues throughout the whole of the early-dynastic period and to the end of the Old Kingdom before the "extended" position first occurs. Pre-dynastic forms of pottery survive in limited num bers in these early-dynastic graves as late as the II dynasty, although new and distinctive types of pottery predominate. Stone vases, which in the pre-dynastic period occur only in limited numbers and of small size (compare Case E), now become one of the principal THE FIRST ROOM features in the furnishing of the early-dynastic tomb and are worked out with consummate skill in alabaster, diorite, slate, and other stones (compare Cases I to M). The beginning of the dynastic period also witnessed a marked increase in the ability of the Egyptians to work in metal, and copper tools and implements come into general use. In consequence flint implements im- FIG. 6. SUPPORTS FOR A COUCH, IN THE FORM OF BULL'S LEGS I TO II DYNASTY FROM ABYDOS mediately deteriorate in quality and never afterward compare with the perfectly worked pre-dynastic flints, yet they continue in use to some extent throughout the whole dynastic period. The metal-workers of the I dynasty also produced bowls and vessels of copper, while the goldsmiths executed the most beautifully wrought ornaments, necklaces, and bracelets. The art of sculpture which had its first primitive beginning in the modeling of the prehistoric figurines (compare those in this room) now develops along definite lines and exhibits remarkable power of execution. Both '3 a handbook of the EGYPTIAN ROOMS stone and ivory are favorite mediums for sculpture, and ivory reliefs and statuettes found in the royal tombs at Abydos, and in the old Osiris temenos there, show a wonderful rendering of detail (compare Case G). The use of glaze has now become common and is applied in a variety of ways, in glazed pottery, forms of orna ment and beads, glazed animal and human figures, and wall-tiles. Of the objects exhibited in this room in illustration of the principal features of the prehistoric and early- dynastic civilization there are shown in Case A some of the principal types of the flint implements of the palaeolithic period. In Case B are forms of pre-dynas tic "decorated" pottery (cf. fig. 4) bearing representa tions of boats with their standards, human and animal figures, spirals, wavy lines, and other forms of orna mentation. In Case C are shown the more commonly occurring types of pottery of the same period, such as red-polished ware, "black-topped," rough brown, and a smooth fine-grained ware, the latter in such forms as the wavy-handled and cylindrical types. Case D con tains principally pottery with white-line decoration (cf. fig. 4), black-incised ware, and fanciful and more rarely occurring forms. In Case E are pre-dynastic stone vases, which were worked out with stone grinders and tools, before the employment of metal tools, and show the remarkable skill attained by the prehistoric Egyptians in the perfection of their manufacture. In a case near the center of the room are shown a number of figurinesof the pre-dynastic period(cf .fig. 5),oneof which is covered with painted decoration. A theory that dec- 14 'S^W-a^^ %^ W^WB*^ FIG. 7. SOME TYPES OF STONE VASES FROM A II DYNASTY TOMB AT SAKKARA A handbook of the EGYPTIAN ROOMS orated figurines of this type afforded evidence that tattooing was practised by the prehistoric Egyptians has been disproved by the fact that examination of the well-preserved burials found in excavation has shown no traces of such a practice. Case F contains some of the characteristic types of smaller material from pre-dynastic graves, suc?h as the flint implements, maces, beads, amulets, flint, ivory and shell bracelets, and slate palettes in the form of birds, turtles, boats, and other shapes. The remaining cases in this room are devoted to material of the early-dynastic period. Case G contains various classes of material: flint implements, which on comparison with those of the pre-dynastic period (Case F) show the deterioration in stone tools which followed the introduction of metal tools, as described previously. Also models of copper implements, ivory and stone bracelets, and fragments of ivory plaques with incised decoration and figures, all found in the royal tombs at Abydos by Flinders Petrie; while from the temenos of the old Osiris temple at Abydos, also excavated by him, come a series of glazed pottery figures of hippopotami, apes, a seated woman holding a child, and several ivory figures including a lion cou- chant and figures of women. In the same case are a number of early-dynastic seal-cylinders, which when rolled upon clay or any similar substance leave the im pression of the design upon them, and thus were used in sealing documents, the stoppers of jars containing wine and the like, and for similar purposes. They are the earliest type of Egyptian seal and first occur in the pre-dynastic period, generally of ivory and with i6 the first ROOM some simple design such as cross-hatched lines, figures of fish, and the like. These seal-cylinders of the suc ceeding early-dynastic period are usually of steatite and bear figures and inscriptions, the latter being among the earliest examples of Egyptian writing. The hiero glyphic signs are often so archaic in character, how ever, that they cannot be read, though in general such seals appear to have been the property of officials and to have been used for official purposes. In Case H is shown an entire tomb-group of pot tery jars and vases from a tomb of the I dynasty at Abydos, excavated by Petrie, while the stone vases from the same tomb are exhibited in the lower part of Case I. In the latter case are also various other types of stone ware of the I-III dynasties. The remaining Cases J to M contain a large and characteristic series of stone vases, dishes, and bowls from a cemetery of the II dynasty at Sakkara, excavated by the Egyptian Government. These illustrate the skill attained at this period in the manufacture of vases of so considerable a size from such stones as alabaster, diorite, slate, and limestone, and at no later time did Egypt produce stone vases comparable to them. (cf. fig. 7 .) They are found in early-dynastic tombs often piled up one upon another, and generally broken. This breaking of the vessels was clearly intentional and obviously occurred at the time of the interment as a part of the ceremony. 17 THE SECOND EGYPTIAN ROOM THE SECOND EGYPTIAN ROOM old kingdom (iii-vi dynasties, ABOUT 2980-2475 B. C.) IN a consideration of the history of the Old Kingdom, beginning with the III dynasty, we are met with almost as great an absence of literary evidence as in the earlier period, and must depend practically on that furnished us by the contemporary monuments. With the beginning of the dynasty the site of the capital had been moved from Upper Egypt to Memphis, and under Zoser and his successors the power of the throne had been vigorously pushed and the prosperity of the country increased. We learn of expeditions on a larger scale sent to work the copper mines in Sinai, which had been a source of supply since the first dy nasty, and of expeditions against the tribes of Nubia which resulted in pushing back the southern frontier. Building operations were undertaken on a more ex tensive basis and, instead of royal tombs built of mud-brick, the first pyramids, so far as is yet known, were constructed by these kings. Two of these have been identified — the step-pyramid at Sakkara, built A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS by Zoser, and the pyramid of Medum, constructed by Snefru, the last king of the dynasty. With the accession of Khufu, the great founder of the IV dynasty, the conditions were ripe for the great period of development which followed and which, last ing for more than four hundred years, produced monu ments which were never surpassed in later periods of Egypt's history. Throughout these dynasties of the Old Kingdom there were constructed the series of stu pendous royal tombs, in the form of pyramids, in the great cemetery of Memphis, at Giza, Abusir, and Sak kara, while surrounding them are the great tombs, known as "mastabas," of the nobles, chief officials of the court, and the priests connected with the pyramid- temples. To provide the material for the construction of the pyramids, armies of men were sent to the quarries in various parts of the country to obtain the limestone, granite, basalt, and alabaster employed in their build ing and to carry out its transportation, while even larger numbers of workmen were employed in the erec tion of the structures. These monuments conformed to a regular and definite plan. They consisted of a core of roughly dressed blocks of limestone laid in mortar, with a smooth outer casing of finely dressed limestone, or, as sometimes occurs, red granite. The pyramid was orientated to the points of the compass and in the middle of the northern side, near the base, a passage led to one or more burial chambers, generally sub terranean, but sometimes with additional chambers in the mass of the pyramid-structure. On the side of the pyramid facing the Nile valley a mortuary-temple was constructed, in which the worship of the king was THE SECOND ROOM carried on after his death. The plan of these temples remains uniform throughout the period of pyramid construction and, with some modifications, is found in the Egyptian temple of all succeeding periods. It consists of two essential parts — (i) the private part of the temple at its rear end, open only to the priests and members of the royal family, consisting of the sanctuary with its stela and altar, the statue-chambers containing the statues of the king, and other chambers for storing the temple treasures and utensils; and (2), the public part of the temple, consisting of an entrance-hall and colonnaded fore-court beyond, with a public altar upon which the offerings were placed and side-chambers for temple-furniture. It is from such colonnaded courts that the red-granite columns in this Second Egyp tian Room and the Third Egyptian Room come. The pyramids and their temples are situated on the slightly elevated desert-plateau close to the edge of the cultivated valley, and from the valley a covered cause way leads up to the temple-entrance. At the lower end of this causeway, in the valley, is a smaller gateway- temple, which also contained statues of the king and through which the people entered as they made their way up, by means of the causeway, to the temple above. From the V dynasty on, the interior of the walls of the causeway and of the temple above were covered with such scenes as the representation of state ceremonies, the victories of the king over his foreign enemies, and processions of nobles and officials bearing offerings to the deceased king. The principal features of pyramid-construction thus outlined may be seen in the model of the pyramid and 23 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS temple of King Sahura at Abusir exhibited in the Third Egyptian Room. The "mastaba" tombs, previously referred to, are so- called from their resemblance to the low, mud benches in the modern Egyptian house. They constitute the principal type of tomb in the Old Kingdom (although rock-cut tombs also occur in Upper Egypt) and follow closely the pyramid in their essential features. In ap pearance they are rectangular in plan and their four sides slope symmetrically at an angle somewhat more abrupt than the regular pyramid-slope (compare photographs in window-frame I). In this period of the Old Kingdom which we are considering they consist of three essential parts: (i) The shaft and burial- chamber. This consists of a shaft, generally perpen dicular, which, piercing the superstructure, descends through the bed-rock to a depth varying from fifty to a hundred feet, out of which leads, at the bottom, the burial-chamber. After the interment was made, the doorway of the chamber was sealed and the shaft filled with rock and gravel to the level of the top of the superstructure (compare photographs in window- frame II). (2) The chapel or offering-chamber. This is a chamber in the superstructure, entered by a doorway in one of the faces of the mastaba and always open and accessible. Here the relatives of the deceased came to make their offerings before the great stela or "false-door" erected in one of its walls, while the walls of this chamber were covered with scenes, painted and sculptured in relief, representing both funeral scenes and events in daily life. It is from the walls of such a chamber, in the tomb of the Prince Ra-em-ka at Sak- 24 FIG. 8. SITE OF THE TOMB OF RA-EM-KA AT SAKKARA WITH THE STEP PYRAMID BEYOND FROM THE NORTH FIG. 9. OFFERING-CHAMBER OF THE TOMB OF RA-EM-KA AT SAKKARA. PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN THE PROCESS OF ITS REMOVAL A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS kara, that the relief-sculptures exhibited in this Second Egyptian Room come. (3) The "serdab" or statue- chamber. This was a secret and inaccessible chamber in the superstructure, in which the portrait-statues of the deceased and members of his family were placed, FIG. 10. WEST WALL OF OFFERING-CHAMBER AT RA-EM-KA with which the "ka" or double was supposed to reside (compare photographs of such a statue-chamber in window-frame II). The principal features of the mastaba-tomb here described are illustrated in the model exhibited in this room. The origin of this type of tomb dates back to the I dynasty when it consisted simply of a low, mud- 26 FIG. II. EAST WALL OF OFFERING-CHAMBER OF RA-EM-KA A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS brick enclosure wall with a gravel filling, erected over a grave to mark its position. Then from the I to the IV dynasties this superstructure develops through sev eral clearly marked stages, till in the Old Kingdom it has become a great construction of limestone with finely dressed casing, often one hundred or more feet in length and twenty to thirty feet in height, such as occur in great numbers throughout the Memphite cemetery, as already described. This Second Egyptian Room is devoted chiefly to the exhibition of the relief-sculptures from the walls of the offering-chamber in the mastaba-tomb of the Prince Ra-em-ka at Sakkara, an official of the V dynasty between 2750 and 2625 B. C. This tomb was discov ered by Mariette and was published by him in Les Mastabas de I'ancien Empire, tomb D. 3. It was situated about five hundred yards due north of the Step Pyramid at Sakkara (cf. fig. 8) and was immediately adjacent to the tomb of Sekhemhathor, an official of the same dynasty, the wall-reliefs of which are shown in the Third Egyptian Room. (cf. fig. 15.) These wall-reliefs of Ra-em-ka are sculptured on a fine-grained limestone and in their delicacy and fine ness of modeling illustrate the degree of perfection attained by the sculptors of this great period of archaic art. On the first screen, at the south end of the room, are exhibited the two sides of the entrance doorway of the chamber, with the same scenes represented in re verse order on both sides. The right side is unfinished, none of the details having yet been introduced, while 28 THE SECOND ROOM in the upper row can be seen the first steps in the sculptor's work — the head of a figure in penciled out line and the first chiseled strokes of the legs of another figure. The scenes represented are, (upper row) the statue of the deceased in a shrine being drawn on a B FIG. 12. NETTING OF BIRDS, FROM WEST WALL OF RA-EM-KA sledge to the tomb (notice the man pouring water under the runners of the sledge); (middle row) a pro cession of figures bearing offerings to the tomb; (lower row) the slaughtering of oxen for the sacrifice. Against the west wall of the room is shown the great stela or "false-door" of Ra-em-ka. The Egyptian tomb had as one of its essential features an offering- niche or stela designating the place where the offerings 29 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS were to be made to the deceased. In the case of the Old Kingdom mastaba, the stela is embodied in one of the walls of the offering-chamber, while in front of it are offering-tables or stands, such as that of King Khafra placed here in illustration, upon which the offerings were laid. This stela of Ra-em-ka has ob viously been appropriated from another tomb, for the original inscriptions in perpendicular lines have only partially been erased. Down the center a single line of inscription has been re-cut, giving a list of the titles of Ra-em-ka. The deceased is represented with his staff and insignia of office at the bottom of each of the four panels of the stela, while at the top in the central panel he is shown seated before a table of offerings. On the central screen (south side) is the south wall of the chamber of Ra-em-ka. At the top of the wall is inscribed a list of offerings to be made to the deceased. Below, the deceased is represented as engaged in hunting. In the upper row he looks on while one of his dogs attacks a fox and another pursues and catches an oryx. In the second row he is represented as about to throw the lasso among a herd of oryx, while at the right he is seen to have succeeded in his throw and to have caught an oryx about the horns. In the two lower rows are the representations of boats rowed by their crews. On the. other side of the central screen is shown the greater part of the west wall of the chamber (cf. fig. lo). The scenes represented are, (upper row) men carrying tables of offerings; (middle row) the carrying of tables of offerings, and at the right a man engaged in roasting a goose; (lower row) at the left, the skinning of an ox; 30 THE SECOND ROOM next, a man boiling meat in a large pot; and at the right, the slaughtering of an ox. Next are exhibited scenes from the north wall of the chamber, as follows: (upper row) a man cleaning fish, while two other men are carrying fish in a basket; at the right, men and women engaged in preparing and cooking food; (lower row) at the left, a procession of offering-bearers; at the right, the making of beer. At the north end of the room is shown the east wall of the chamber (cf. fig. ii). The scenes repre sented on the whole of this wall, with the exception of the bottom row, are in illustration of the offerings made at the tomb. In the uppermost rows, cattle, antelope, and oryx are being led before the deceased, who stands at the right accompanied by his little son. Then fol low representations of various kinds of game, geese, ducks, pigeons, quail, and cranes. Below, a long pro cession of girls bring baskets fifled with fruits, vege tables and many other offerings. In the lower row is the representation of a harvesting scene in its various stages. On a pedestal near by is a scene from the west wall of the chamber representing the netting of birds in a marsh, (cf. fig. 12.) The net has been set about a lotus marsh. The leader of the group, holding a cloth above his head with both hands, is supposed to be concealed where he can watch the birds and is giving the signal to his men, who are drawing in on the net and anchoring their rope around a peg in the ground. In the center of the room is a portion of the shaft of a red-granite column, with palm-leaf capital, from the mortuary-temple of the pyramid of King Unas, at 31 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS Sakkara, dating from the end of the V dynasty (about 2650 B. C). The reconstruction of the column to approximately its original height has been carried out from measurements of two similar columns from the same temple, now in the Cairo Museum. THE THIRD EGYPTIAN ROOM THE THIRD EGYPTIAN ROOM. OLD KINGDOM AND PRE-MIDDLK KINGDOM THE THIRD EGYPTIAN ROOM OLD KINGDOM (lll-Vl DYNASTIES, ABOUT 2980-2475 B.C.) AND THE INTERMEDIATE PERIOD (Vll-Xl DYNASTIES, ABOUT 2475-2150 B. C). IN this room the consideration of the monuments of the Old Kii>gdom is continued, and is further car ried through the succeeding dynasties from the VII to the XI, an intermediate period of some three hundred years between the fall of the Old Kingdom and the rise of the Middle Kingdom, when the country had fallen into such a condition of weakness and disorgan ization that but little is known of its rulers or the artis tic products of their reigns. The causes which seem to have led to the breaking up of the Old Kingdom lay in the rise in power of the official classes. By the beginning of the V dynasty the kings no longer possessed the unlimited power held by their predecessors, and provincial officials were gaining a stronger grasp on their respective districts through the hereditary succession which they now en joyed. These conditions appear to have increased as time went on until, with the VI dynasty, these pro- 35 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS vincial governors no longer appear as local representa tives of a centralized government but have become firmly established in their respective provinces as practically independent princes and landed barons. It is in the subsequent struggle between the throne and its rebellious lords that the great Memphite Kingdom is disrupted and comes to an end. Then follows a series of small and short-lived dynasties, during which FIG. 14. BLOCK OF OLD KINGDOM RELIEF FOUND RE-USED AS BUILDING MATERIAL IN THE PYRAMID OF AMENEMHAT I, AT LISHT the disorganization of the country is so complete that neither royal nor private monuments of consequence are produced, while the high perfection of artistic achievement seen in the Old Kingdom is lost in a con dition of local and inferior productions. The material exhibited in this room illustrates the facts thus outlined. On the south wall of the room and on the adjoining screen are shown blocks of relief- sculpture from monuments of the Old Kingdom, found under rather unusual conditions in the work of the Metropolitan Museum's Egyptian Expedition on the Middle Kingdom pyramids at Lisht. They were found re-used as building material in the construction of the pyramid of King Amenemhat I and are witness to the 36 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS fact, which occurs throughout the whole stretch of Egyptian history, that the monuments of an eariier period, when fallen into disuse, were plundered and stripped and served as stone quarries for the construc tions of later periods. From the character of the scenes on these blocks here exhibited they can be identified as coming from both mastaba-tombs and pyramid- temples of the V or VI dynasties. In the center of the room is a massive monolithic column with palm-leaf capital, of red-granite, from the fore-court of the pyramid-temple of King Sahura, the second King of the V dynasty (about 2740-30 B. C), at Abusir. This pyramid and its mortuary-temple were cleared by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft in 1908-9, and their construction is illustrated in the model of that pyramid and its related parts exhibited in this room. This column and the other example of palm-leaf column, in the Second Egyptian Room, from the pyr amid-temple of King Unas, the last king of the same dynasty (about 2650 B. C), are among the earliest known columns in the history of architecture. At the north end of this room is the west wall, with two offering-niches and scenes in painted relief, from the offering-chamber in the mastaba of Sekhemhat hor, a priest of the reign of King Userkaf, of the V dynasty (about 2750 B. C.) at Sakkara. At the bottom of the panels of the left niche, Sekhemhathor is represented in each case with one of his little sons, while on the corresponding panels of the right niche he is seen with his wife. Between the two niches are scenes representing (above) two seated figures playing draughts (cf. fig. 16) and musicians with their various 38 THE THIRD ROOM instruments, (middle row)a procession of figures bearing offerings to the tomb; (lower row) the slaughter of oxen for the sacrifice. Near by is a block of painted relief, from the same tomb, representing the wife of Sekhemhathor seated before a table of offerings. On the screen in this end of the room are, on one side, blocks of relief-sculpture from tombs of the V and VI ¦¦¦] '^4^'^i^^t^-^ ^^Pf^W/l FIG. l6. DETAIL OF WALL-RELIEF OF SEKHEMHATHOR dynasties, together with panels in painted relief from stelze of the X dynasty at Sakkara. On the other side of this screen and on the adjoining wall are architectural fragments, stelae, and inscribed blocks from mastaba- tombs of local dignitaries of the VII or VIII dynasty, at Dendera. In Wall-case A are, dating from the V and VI dynasties, examples of stone ware, principally toilet vases for holding cosmetics and ointments; an ala baster offering-table and tablet for holding the seven sacred oils, together with a model offering-table and dishes of limestone; and ceremonial wooden sandals. Of the XI dynasty are a series of painted wooden fig ures and wooden statuettes, and wooden bows and staff, mostly from Thebes. 39 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS In Wall-case B are exhibited types of pottery of the VIl-XI dynasties, as well as a series of terra-cotta models of tables of offerings and models of houses, most of the latter from rock-cut tombs of the XI dynasty at Rifeh, near Assiut. THE FOURTH AND FIFTH EGYPTIAN ROOMS FIG. 17. THE FOURTH EGYPTIAN ROOM. MIDDLE KINGDOM FIG. 18. VIEW OF NORTH PYRAMID AT LISHT, WITH CAMP OF THE EXPEDITION IN THE FOREGROUND THE FOURTH AND FIFTH EGYPTIAN ROOMS MIDDLE KINGDOM (xi-XIV DYNASTIES, ABOUT 2160-I7OO B. C.) AT the rise of the Middle Kingdom we emerge into clear light once more, out of what is per haps the darkest and most obscure period in the whole of Egyptian history. With the close of the sixth dynasty the old order had passed away, and for the next three centuries we are met with what is to all intents and purposes a complete blank. Names of kings to cover the period are given, it is true, in the lists compiled at a later period of the history, but monu mental evidence to support their shadowy claims is entirely lacking. We can, however, form a pretty clear idea of what the condition of the country during this dark period was. In Egypt, as in all oriental countries, there was a lurking menace to the throne in the p^erson of any noble or official who attained to a more than ordinary degree of wealth or power. Through the prosperous times of the Old Kingdom the power of the 43 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS nobles and provincial landed proprietors had been gradually growing, and we must suppose that at the end of the sixth dynasty, there being no one of the ruling house strong enough to enforce his rights, the various semi-independent chieftains, for such they had become, threw off all pretence of loyalty, and proceeded, first to establish themselves as little kings in their own provinces, and then to set about picking a quarrel with . their neighbors in the next. By the tenth dynasty one of the old landed families of the Heracleopolitan nome had actually succeeded in establishing a more or less substantial claim to the over-lordship of the whole country. Their hold on the throne, however, did not long remain uncontested, as they were challenged by a family which had grown to power in the hitherto little known district of Thebes. The struggle was keen, two severe battles being fought; but the Thebans were in the end victorious, and their leader, Antef, became the first king of the eleventh dynasty, and the founder of the second of the great periods of Egyptian history. The eleventh dynasty kings, Antefs and Mentuhoteps, were the first since the sixth dynasty whose claim to the throne of Egypt could be considered more than an empty boast; and we even find them seeking to extend their territory southward into Nubia. They left but few monuments, however, and their hold over the northern parts of Egypt at any rate must have been of a somewhat precarious nature. Amenemhat, first king of the twelfth dynasty, not the direct heir to the throne, though probably of the royal family, recognized early in his reign the necessity of establishing a firmer hold over the still troublesome 44 FIG. 19. THE FIFTH EGYPTIAN ROOM. MIDDLE KINGDOM A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS nobles to the north, and to this end moved the royal residence and seat of government from Thebes to a place not far south of the old traditional capital, Mem phis, where he founded a city called Ithtowe, "the Captor of the Two Lands." From his new center Amenemhat was able to make his influence felt to the furthest end of the country. Though lacking the power definitely to crush the nobles, he was clever enough to make his interests their own, and to turn to good use the jealousy which each felt toward the other. Under him, and the able and vigorous line of monarchs who succeeded him, Egypt, once more united, entered upon a period of prosperity such as was only once exceeded during the whole course of her history. It was during this twelfth dynasty that Egypt first woke up to the possibility of interesting herself in a worid outside the Nile valley. There had, of course, even in the Old Kingdom, been a certain small amount of trade be tween Egypt and the neighboring countries; but now conquest and enforced tribute began to take the place of, or at least to supplement, trade. Under Senusert I (Sesostris) campaigns on a much more ambitious scale than had hitherto been attempted were carried out in Nubia, and under the later kings, especially Senusert III, the wars of the Empire were anticipated by successful raids into Syria. So great an impression indeed did these early wars make on the imagination of the Egyptians that they passed into popular legend, and by Greek times the exploits of all these twelfth dynasty kings were elaborated into a romance, woven round the name of the great hero and conqueror, Sesostris. Nor was it only by their wars that the 46 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS twelfth dynasty kings added to the wealth and pros perity of the country. They seem to have been very skilful engineers, and they paid a great deal of atten tion to increasing, or rather to regulating, the productive power of the Nile overflow. One at least of their canals is in use to this day. Their greatest exploit lay in their utilization of the Fayum basin, the Lake Moeris of the ancients, as a gigantic reservoir. By a series of dams they not only regulated the inflow and outflow of the waters of the lake, but at the same time reclaimed for use thousands of acres of what had hitherto been un- cultivable marsh-land. Freed from the despotic yoke of the first pyramid- builders of the Old Kingdom, and as yet untainted by the outside world, and untroubled by the cares of Em pire, this Egypt of the Amenemhats and'Senuserts presents a picture of very real and far-reaching pros perity. The decentralization of government and de velopment of a feudal system had wrought many beneficial changes in the general life of the country. The office of nome-governor was no longer a direct appointment from the crown, but descended by heredi tary right from father to son. Hence the nomarch, or feudal prince, instead of keeping up his establish ment, as a temporary appointee would have done, in the neighborhood of the court, lived and died in his province, and therefore took a direct and personal in terest in its affairs and in the welfare of its inhabitants. Clear evidence of this is afforded by the somewhat naive and self-laudatory inscriptions found on the tomb-walls of many of these princes, which describe in much detail the impartiality of their justice, and 48 THE FOURTH AND FIFTH ROOMS the benefits which they showered on the poor. Dis count much of this as we may, we can at least see that their standard was high, and it is probable that they did their best to live up to it. The establishment, more over, of these little courts in the various provinces naturally gave a great impetus to local industries, and provided employment for a vast number of minor officials; both of which were contributing causes to the great increase of importance in this feudal period of the middle class. It was possible now for even the peasant to rise to a position of wealth and influence. It is in this period too that we find the first traces of a standing army, originating in a body of personal at tendants on the king, to secure his person and to guard his palace. After two hundred years of vigorous life, this great family of twelfth dynasty kings seems to have ex hausted its vitality, and we enter upon another dark period of disorganization and anarchy. A thirteenth dynasty line of kings tried to carry on the tradition of their predecessors of the previous dynasty, but they lacked the strength of character to enforce it, and the troubles of the sixth to eleventh dynasty period began again. Rival claimants to the throne sprang up all over the country. In the later lists an incredible number of kings is given for the period, but, with few exceptions, there are no monuments to support them, and it is probable that their reigns were of the briefest, and that there were often two, or even three, kings occupying different parts of the country at the same time. This time, however, Egypt was not to be left to work out her own salvation. In the twelfth dynasty, 49 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS Egypt for the first time had carried warfare into foreign countries; now, in the dark period that followed, she was to experience her first occupation by a foreign peo ple. She had made herself over-prominent by her wars, and was to suffer for it. We know very little of these foreigners, or of the manner in which they came into the country. Their rulers were known in later times as the "Hyksos" or "Shepherd" kings, and it is probable that they belonged to a confederation of nomad tribes from the east. However that may be, we know that within about a hundred years of the last of the great twelfth dynasty kings they were occupying the greater part of the country, and their kings were styling them selves Kings of Egypt. The Middle Kingdom, like the Old, had passed away and become history. The Middle Kingdom marks for us the second of the four great periods of Egyptian art. In the confusion and anarchy which followed the collapse of the Mem phite ruling house there had been little encouragement for artistic development, and, with the exception of the work of a single local school of artists, to be noticed later, the monuments belonging to the period between the sixth and the eleventh dynasties are as poor in execution as they are scanty in number. The pros perous times of the Middle Kingdom, however, once more gave the artist an opportunity to mature his powers, and it is to this period that we owe, on certain sides, the most finished work that Egypt ever produced. In studying Middle Kingdom art, one is struck first of all by its surprisingly close adherence to Old Kingdom tradition. After a lapse of four centuries, the greater 50 THE FOURTH AND FIFTH ROOMS part of which time was, from an artistic standpoint, barren and unproductive, Egypt enters upon a period of growth and vigor such as she has never experienced before, and one would naturally expect a new school of artists to arise who would develop along lines of FIG. 21. GRANITE ALTAR OF AMENEMHAT I their own. In the tenth dynasty a school of Hera cleopolitan artists did actually make tentative efforts toward breaking away from tradition, but in the wars that put an end to their dynasty they too were over whelmed, and we hear of them no more. The eleventh and twelfth dynasty artists, on the other hand, not merely accepted tradition as it stood, but deliberately reverted to archaism. Special researches were under taken to ensure that the forms of the gods, for instance, should be represented in the old way; and we even have evidence, from the work of the museum's expe dition at Lisht, that direct copies, line for line, were 51 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS made of Old Kingdom temple-reliefs for use in Middle Kingdom temples. Temple architecture follows gener ally along Old Kingdom lines; and in tomb-construction a pyramid was still considered essential for a king, while the private individual in many cases went back to the FIG. 22. BURIAL CHAMBER OF SENBTES XII DYNASTY old type of closed mastaba. It is in this brilliant period of the twelfth dynasty that one regrets, more perhaps than at any other time, the manner in which Egyptian art was crippled by its blind adherence to tradition and fixed canons. When we consider the degree of excellence that was attained in spite of this artificial atmosphere, it is hardly too much to assert 53 THE FOURTH AND FIFTH ROOMS that if Egypt could ever have been able to develop a free and naturalistic school of artists, she would have produced work that would have taken rank among the greatest masterpieces of the world. Regret as we may, however, the limitations to which the Middle Kingdom artist voluntarily delivered him self over, we can have nothing but admiration when FIG. 23. POTTERY FROM THE TOMB OF SENBTES XII DYNASTY we examine the details of his work. His technical skill was wonderful. The statues are in many cases exquisitely modeled, and the material in which he works seems to make no difference to the artist what ever, be it wood, granite, or even obsidian. It is in this period that we first meet with statues of colossal size, such as became so popular under the powerful kings of the Empire. The relief sculpture — there are 53 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS good examples of it in the Fifth Room — though it lacks the life and spontaneity of the best Old Kingdom reliefs (compare those in the Second Room) is yet wonderfully effective, and down to its smallest detail repays careful examination. It is indeed a pre- Raphaelitesque attention to detail that distinguishes the twelfth dynasty artist almost more than any other characteristic. The feathering of the ducks' wings on some of the Lisht reliefs in the Fifth Room is worked out with the most scrupulous care, while his love of delicate and minute patterns is well illustrated by the polychrome coffin in the Fourth Room. In the minor arts the attention to detail and excellence of technique naturally appear to the greatest advantage. To take a single instance — twelfth dynasty jewelry, such as was found in the tombs of the princesses at Dahshur (compare also the jewelry from the tomb of Senbtes in the Fourth Room) is far in advance of that made in any other period, and could hardly be surpassed in the present day. Among innovations of the period we may mention the so-called proto-doric column, the scarab, the spiral as a motive in design, and the prom inent use of a number of hitherto practically unknown stones, such as blue marble, amethyst, green jasper, and hematite. Middle Kingdom art is particularly well represented in our Collection, for it was upon a site of this period that the Museum Expedition first began its work in Egypt. The pyramid-field of Lisht is situated on the edge of the desert about thirty miles south of Cairo, and marks the site of the pyramids of Amenemhat 1 54 FIG. 24. JEWELRY OF SENBTES. XII DYNASTY A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS and of his son Senusert I, first and second kings of the twelfth dynasty. The pyramids are about a mile distant one from the other, and the ground around them and between them is occupied by contemporary and slightly later tombs of nobles and private indivi duals. Work had already been done on this site by an expedition under the direction of M. M. Gautier and Jequier in the seasons of 1894-5 and 1895-6, but it was hoped that its possibilities were by no means exhausted, and, as it turned out, this hope was abundantly jus tified. In the season of 1906-7 the east side of the northern pyramid, that of Amenemhat I, was cleared, and the remains of its funerary temple were laid bare. Two interesting points were made clear early in the excavation. In the first place, it was discovered that the pyramid itself was constructed largely of blocks stolen from earlier structures. Reliefs, both mastaba and temple, that came clearly from an Old Kingdom site, were found buried in the pyramid core. A selected number of these reliefs are shown in the Third Room. Secondly, it was found that the walls of the temple itself were in part constructed with blocks taken from an earlier temple of Amenemhat himself. The five painted reliefs (Fig. 34) on the north-east wall of the Fifth Room were discovered in position in the foundation course of one of the temple walls. From this temple also came the granite altar in the center of the Fifth Room (Fig. 21), and a limestone "false door," which is now in the Cairo Museum. In the course of the same season work was also begun on a part of the cemetery to the westward of the pyramid, and here the expedi tion was fortunate enough to find a tomb with an un- 56 FIG. 25. GIRDLE OF SENBTES XII DYNASTY A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS plundered burial of considerable value. A coffin and other objects from this tomb are all shown together in the first section of the Fourth Room, together with photographs illustrating the various stages in its ex cavation. In the following season, that of 1907-8, the north side of the pyramid was attacked, and its entrance passage disclosed. Unfortunately, however, it was found that the burial chamber was below modern water-level, and Work in this direction had to be aban doned pending the installation of a pump. Further progress was made with the excavation of the cemetery, and some preliminary investigation was undertaken of the ground in the neighborhood of the southern pyra mid. The season of 1908-9 was spent almost entirely on the southern pyramid, and resulted in the acquisi tion by the Museum of a number of important objects. The walls of the funerary temple, like that of the northern pyramid, had for the most part been thrown down, and the stone carried away to be turned into lime; but a number of finely painted blocks had sur vived the general destruction, and still lay buried among the ruins. A selection of these is shown on the walls and screens at the western end of the Fifth Room. Fig. 20 gives a view of the excavation of this temple, taken from the eastern side of the pyramid. In the photograph traces can also be seen of the causeway which led down from the temple to the cultivation. This has as yet been only partially investigated, but from evidence already obtained we know that it originally consisted of a covered-in passage, that its walls were adorned with finely colored relief-sculpture, and that its roof was decorated with a pattern of stars, 58 FIG. 26. COFFIN OF AMENY XII DYNASTY FIG. 27. COFFIN OF NEPHTHYS XII DYNASTY A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS light blue on a dark blue ground. On either side of this passage, at intervals of ten metres, there were niches, in which stood life-size statues of the king, rep resented in the form of the god Osiris. Portions of a number of these statues were found, the two which stand on either side of the west door in the Fifth Room being the best preserved that the expedition has so far been able to recover. Another distinguishing feature of this pyramid was its enclosure-wall, a mas sive structure some five metres high, decorated at regular intervals, both inside and out, with panels containing the king's name. Parts of these panels, and of the hawks which surmounted them, are also shown in the Fifth Room (Fig. 38). It is hoped that at some future date we may be able to reconstruct within the museum a section of this enclosure-wall with panels and hawks complete. An examination of the interior chambers of this pyramid was checked, as in the case of the other, by the presence of subterranean water. For the past two years the installation of the Egyp tian material in its new rooms has necessitated a temporary postponement of the work at Lisht, but in the coming season (1911-12) the expedition proposes to resume work there, as well as on its other concessions. Much still remains to be done, both on the pyramids themselves and on other unexplored portions of the site. THE FOURTH ROOM THE Fourth Egyptian Room contains the smaller classes of Middle Kingdom material. In the first section of the room (Cases A-H) are grouped together the contents of a single tomb found 60 THE FOURTH ROOM at Lisht in the season of 1906-7. The tomb, one of the ordinary shaft and chamber type, was situated % % FIG. 28. CANOPIC BOX OF SENBA SHOWING INNER LID XII DYNASTY FIG. 29. CANOPIC BOX OF SENBA SHOWING JARS XII DYNASTY inside the mastaba-enclosure of an important early twelfth dynasty official named Senusert. It was the FIG. 30. CANOPIC JAR OF KAY X DYNASTY only one of its kind that had escaped a thorough ran sacking at the hands of plunderers, but we know, from 61 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS scattered remains found in other tombs, that it was in every way typical of the period. The owner of the tomb was a woman who died at the age of about fifty years. The inscriptions on her coffins give no informa tion about her beyond her two names, Senbtes and Sit- Hapi; from the position of her tomb, however, we may infer that she was a member of Senusert's household. The burial was enclosed in a series of three coffins, but of these the innermost and outer had crumbled away. The second coflfin (Fig. 22), of cedar, decorated with gold leaf, is shown in the center of the section (Case D). The eye-panel, at the end of one of the sides, is a usual feature in twelfth dynasty coffins, the mummy within being so disposed that its eyes came just opposite the panel, with intent that thereby the soul might be enabled to look out into the world. On the left. Case A contains the set of Canopic vases, alabaster with wooden heads. Vases of this type were intended for the reception of the viscera, which were removed from the body in the process of mummification, and treated separately. The jars were always four in number, and were under the special protection of the four gods of the dead, Hapi, Amset, Duamutef, and Kebehsenuf. They occur but rarely in the Old Kingdom, usually with flat lids instead of heads, are comparatively frequent in Middle Kingdom tombs, and universal in all but the smallest Empire and later tombs. It was not until the Empire that an elaborate process of mummification, such as the use of these jars implies, was brought within the reach of any but the very wealthiest. The name Canopic, by which these vases are generally known, was given to 62 THE FOURTH ROOM them by early Egyptologists, under the misconception that they could be identified with the worship of a certain god whose cult centered in the town of Canopus. FIG. 31. WOODEN STATUETTE OF SENBA, XII DYNASTY In Case B there are a set of bows and ceremonial staves, found inside the cedar coffin. Cases C, E, and H contain the complete set of pottery (Fig. 23) found in the outer chamber of the 63 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS tomb. In the majority of cases the food-offering that these pots were supposed to contain existed only in imagination, but two of the large flat dishes actually did contain food, duck bones being found in one, and bones of larger meat-joints in the other. Case F, on the right of the coffin, contains the jewelry found on the mummy, a circlet of twisted gold wire, gold rosettes from an artificial wig, necklaces of gold, silver, beryl, carnelian, and ivory beads (Fig. 24), two elaborate bead collars, a very delicate girdle composed of beads of gold, carnelian, beryl, lapis-lazuli, and ivory (Fig. 24), bracelets, anklets, and other strings of beads. In Case G are shown a bead panel, reconstructed from the breast of the innermost coffin (see painting on wall), a girdle of tiny beads arranged in patterns, with larger pendant beads hanging in strings to the knees (Fig. 25), a ceremonial whip of wood, carnelian and glazed pottery, a bronze dagger in a wooden sheath, and two stone maces on wooden handles. Positive Frame I, in the window, contains a series of views illustrating the various stages in the clearing of this tomb, and in frames on the end wall are shown plans and sections of the tomb, together with a de scription of the position in which its contents were found. Case I, between the windows, contains the wooden framework, and part of the plaited cordwork which stretched across it, from a bier. This came from Gebe- lein, and belongs to the eleventh dynasty. In Case J, in the middle of the room, are shown a number of the finer small objects of the period. On the 64 THE FOURTH ROOM raised center there is a set of animal-shaped toilet vases in blue marble: the provenance of these is unknown, but they probably all belong to a single tomb. The south end of the case is given up to a tomb group of toilet vases and jewelry found by the Egypt Explora tion Fund at Abydos. On the west there are a number of ivory magical wands, most of which come from the work of the Museum's Expedition at Lisht. The north side contains a set of animal figures in glazed pottery, also from a tomb at Lisht, while on the east side there are a number of miscellaneous objects, among which we should single out the beautifully modeled statuette- head in obsidian from the Murch Collection. Case K contains the wooden coffin of a twelfth dynasty prince named Ameny (Fig. 26). This is a very good example of a type of coffin peculiar to the Middle Kingdom, in which the entire surface of the wood was covered with elaborate and brightly colored designs. The central motive in the scheme of design, as is usual in such coffins, consists of a series of so-called "false doors," doors, that is, through which the soul could come and go as it pleased. The spaces between and above these doors are carefully marked off into squares and oblongs, and these again, with true Middle Kingdom preciosity, are filled with a variety of minute patterns. This coffin, the coffins in Case O, the servant models in Case R, the Canopies and wooden ushabti-figures in Case L, and the wooden statuette in Case M all come from a single cemetery, excavated at Meir, in the neighborhood of Assiut, under the supervision of the Egyptian Government. 65 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS The Canopic box in Case L (Fig. 28) is of an un usual type, for it contains an inner lid, to which are fastened four miniature wooden heads, imitating the heads on the Canopic jars themselves. It belonged to a twelfth dynasty official named Senba, Superinten dent of the Palace. The jars which the box contained are shown on the right of it. On the left there is another set of Canopic jars of about the same date, but of pot tery instead of stone. These are inscribed with the name of their owner, Hesu-nefery. In the middle of the upper shelf is shown a very curious and unusual set of Canopic jars, made of stucco, inscribed with the name Kay. The heads of these Canopies are not made to close the mouths of the jars in the usual way, but fit over them like hoods, the idea being probably de rived from the plaster masks which fitted over the heads of mummies. These probably belong to the tenth dynasty. On the right there are two wooden ushabtis, one of which is inscribed with the name, Senb-su, and on the left, four wooden statuettes of another twelfth dynasty official named Mere. The small pedestal case to the right. Case M, con tains a very perfect wooden statuette of the Senba already mentioned ( Fig. 31). Case N contains representative selections of Middle Kingdom beads and amulets, of amethyst, carnelian, garnet, hematite, glazed pottery, and other materials. For these we are indebted almost entirely to the Murch Collection, given by Miss Gould. There are also a number of royal cylinder seals, and a variety of other objects, mainly from the excavations of the Museum Expedition in the Lisht cemetery. 66 THE FOURTH ROOM In Positive Frame 1 1 this side of the work of the Ex pedition is illustrated by a number of views. Another magnificent twelfth dynasty coffin is shown FIG. 32. INNER COFFIN OF NEPHTHYS XII DYNASTY in Case O (Fig. 27). In this example, instead of cover ing his whole surface with an intricate design, the artist concentrated his energies on the eye-panel, combining with it a false door of most elaborate pattern, the 67 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS details of which, down to the bolts and hinges of the door, are unusually perfect, even for the twelfth dynasty. In the rest of the coffin he relied for his decorative effect on a series of horizontal and vertical bands of brightly painted inscriptions. The edges of the coffin are or namented with strips of gold leaf, and in this respect, and in the arrangement of the bands of inscriptions, the coffin presents a very close parallel to the outer coffin of Senbtes. An interesting point about this coffin is that it was not used by the person for whom it was originally intended. The name and title are those of a woman, Nephthys, but the rest of the in scription clearly refers to a man, and a close examina tion reveals the fact that the original name, that of an official, Oukh-hotep, was erased, and that of Nephthys painted over it. On the further side of the case are the inner coffin and mummy of the same burial. The mummy has unfortunately been partially unwrapped, and the outer coverings are gone. The coffin (Fig. 32) is of almost exactly the same type as the innermost coffin of the tomb of Senbtes. It is, however, made of cartonnage instead of wood. The locks by which the lid was fastened to the body of the coffin are still in position. In Case P are shown two "foundation-deposits" of model vases from the temple of Amenemhat I at Lisht, a small wooden coffin, two ushabti boxes, and a number of stone-masons' mallets and other objects from the same site; a series of wooden dolls, stone and wooden statuettes, animal figures of glazed pottery, stone toilet vases, and a selection of pottery. Case Q contains a wooden model-house, in which are THE FOURTH ROOM a number of servant figures engaged in the preparation of food-offerings for their master. In Case R there is a series of similar models, all of which come from the Meir cemetery. These wooden models are very characteristic of the earlier part of the Middle Kingdom. They represent scenes of everyday life, and are placed in the tomb to ensure to the de ceased a continuation of the activities of the world which he is leaving, in the spirit world to which he goes. Here, for instance, we have boats with crew complete, men driving donkeys home from field or market, a cow with her calf, models of houses, groups of servants busily engaged in bread or beer making, in slaughtering and cutting up oxen. Models such as these were in tended to supplement, or in some cases perhaps to take the place of, the scenes of similar character that were painted on the tomb walls. On the north wall there are tv/o statuettes, the upper part of a statue in red granite, and two painted lime stone offering-stelae. THE FIFTH ROOM RETRACING our steps through the third room we enter the large Central Hall. This, with the exception of a single group of objects, found by the Egypt Exploration Fund at Deir-el-Bahri, is filled with relief-sculpture and other of the heavier material found by the Museum's Egyptian Expedition at Lisht; that from the north pyramid being confined as far as possible to the east end of the room, and that from the south pyramid to the west. The Deir-el-Bahri material is shown in the first bay 69 a HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS to the left. In the center of the bay stands the lime stone sarcophagus of an eleventh dynasty priestess named Henhenet, whose tomb and shrine, with those of six other priestesses, were situated within the pre cincts of the temple of Mentuhotep III. The east wall and the two sides of the first screen are devoted to colored reliefs, both from the shrines of these priestesses, and from the actual temple of Mentuhotep himself. A FIG. 33. RELIEF FROM THE TEMPLE OF MENTUHOTEP III AT DEIR-EL-BAHRI. XI DYNASTY comparison of these eleventh dynasty temple-reliefs with those of Amenemhat I and Senusert I in the same room is both interesting and instructive; for it gives us an opportunity of studying the progress of a single school of artists through a period of at least ninety years. In the first place, we note that by the time of Mentuhotep, Middle Kingdom art had already arrived at a state of maturity. Reversion to archaism, even so eariy in the Middle Kingdom as this, was an accom plished fact, and in their salient features the reliefs of Mentuhotep at one end of our period bear a striking resemblance to those of Senusert at the other. A careful examination, however, of the respective work of the two kings reveals the fact that in the course of 70 kjdBE^Aki. t #1 Ll^^lf s5 eif i^l ^i=^^ ^T .n^ FIG. 34. TEMPLE-RELIEF OF AMENEMHAT I XII DYNASTY A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS the period that lay between them there had developed a great increase of technical skill. Reference here to the Amenemhat reliefs on the wall and screen of the opposite bay shows that this improvement in technique was developed, not in the period between Mentu hotep and Amenemhat, but in the later years of the latter's reign, and in the early years of that of Senusert. It was in the general prosperity and security inaugu- FIG. 35. TEMPLE RELIEF OF AMENEMHAT XII DYNASTY rated by Amenemhat that art received its impetus. Ex cavations at Lisht have fortunately given us examples of Amenemhat's temple-reliefs at two distinct periods of his reign. As we have already mentioned, in the short account of the excavations, reliefs from one of Amenemhat's early buildings were found reused in the construction of his funerary temple. These early reliefs show very little advance on those of Mentuhotep, whereas the later reliefs, which belong actually to the funerary temple, are as finished in their technique as any that the temple of Senusert produced. The two long blocks on the wall (Fig. 34) are examples of the 72 THE FIFTH ROOM eariier style of Amenemhat, while some of the pieces on the screen (Fig. 35), in very low delicate relief, are shown as examples of the latter. As an example of the copying of Old Kingdom motives we may single out the small block on the screen depicting the seated figure of a FIG. 36. LIMESTONE STATUETTE-HEAD OF AMENEMHAT 1 XII DYNASTY boy named Senusert-ankh. This is an exact replica of a figure found by the German Expedition in the fifth dynasty temple of Ne-user-re at Abusir, and, had it not been for the name, we should unhesitatingly have classed it with the stolen blocks reused in the con struction of the pyramid. A still more startling ex ample of appropriation of fifth dynasty designs was furnished by a stone which was kept for the Cairo Museum. 73 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS In the center of this northeast bay there is a large granite sarcophagus, cut from a single block. This comes from one of the more important private tombs at Lisht, unfortunately a plundered one. The quartzite Canopic box against the wall, with its separate space hollowed out for each of the four jars, belongs to the same tomb. The granite altar (Fig. 21) which occupies the central position in the room comes from the funerary temple of Amenemhat I : it was found in the season of 1906-7. The figures engraved on three of its sides represent the various nomes or provinces, each carrying his dis tinctive nome standard. On the top, there is at one end a hollow for the reception of the offerings, and at the other a conventional offering-table is carved, on which are represented two loaves of bread and two libation vases. It was originally embedded in the floor to the point where the dressed surface of stone begins, and, from the fact that one of its sides is left blank, it is clear that it was placed against a wall, presumably in front of the "false door." A similar altar from the south pyramid, which was found by the French Expe dition in the season of 1894-5, is now in the Cairo Museum. The statuette-head (Fig. 36) in the small case behind the altar was found in a pit on the east side of the northern pyramid. It is probably a portrait of Amen emhat I. On the right, in the central bay, is shown the upper part of a proto-doric column found in the temple of the north pyramid. This is the earliest example of this type of column that has yet been found in Egypt. 74 TH E FIFTH ROOM The Positive Frame, in the window, contains a series of general views, illustrating the progress of excavations at the north pyramid. In the central bay, on the south side of the room, there is a lion's head, of colossal size, in limestone, found FIG. 37. TEMPLE RELIEF FROM SOUTH PYRAMID AT LISHT XII DYNASTY in the season of 1908-9, in the course of excavations at the south pyramid. The head, a splendid example of twelfth dynasty sculpture, comes originally from the temple roof, where it formed part of a gargoyle. A 75 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS somewhat similar head, but in a terribly battered con dition, was found in the temple of the north pyramid. In the window. Positive Frame 1 1 illustrates the work carried on in the season of 1908-9 at the south pyramid. The photograph in the middle of the frame gives a portrait of Senusert, taken from one of the series of ten statues found by the French Expedition in the neighborhood of the south pyramid temple. The granite seated statue, of which only the lower half remains, belongs to a tomb that lay to the south east of the southern pyramid . Its owner was the holder of "several official titles, but unfortunately the inscrip tion is broken away just short of the name. On either side of the west door stand two of the Osiride statues of King Senusert which, as we have already described, were stationed at regular intervals on either side of the causeway which led up to his pyramid. Statues of this type, representing the king in the form of Osiris, god of the dead, were apparently usual features in Middle Kingdom funerary temples. The remainder of these two end walls, the western screens, and the cases in the two west bays are devoted to reliefs from the southern pyramid. Those on the south-west wall (Fig. 38) all belong to the enclosure- wall panels referred to in the note on the excavations. The framed sketch in the middle of the wall is intended to give an idea of the original appearance of this en closure wall. The panels were extremely elaborate, and the details were worked with the utmost care. At the top, on each side, came the hawks, their crowns just meeting at the summit of the wall. Next came the two names of the king; below these there was the usual 76 THE FIFTH BOOM "false door," decorated, much in the style of the poly chrome coffin in the Fourth Room, with an infinity of minute patterns, and at the bottom of all a figure of the Nile god Hapi bringing offerings. On the wall are shown two incomplete figures of hawks, two pieces of the names, and a single figure of Hapi. The stones from the funerary temple are in two FIG. 38. OSIRIDE STATUE OF SENUSERT I, AND RELIEF FROM ENCLOSURE WALL OF HIS PYRAMID XII DYNASTY Styles: sunken relief, shown on the south side of the room, and raised relief, on the north. The temple walls had in every case been thrown down, and the majority of its stones had been carried off, either for building purposes, or for converting into lime. It was not possible to do much in the way of piecing together, and the fragments of relief have in most cases to be 77 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS shown as units. One wall, however, had escaped with less damage than the others, and we were able to re construct a portion of it into tolerably complete form. This is shown on the north-west wall. As will be seen (Fig. 37), the design on this particular wall of the temple represents a procession of officials bringing offerings to the king. Their offerings, in most cases, take the form of ducks, either trussed on a platter, carried alive in the hand, or slung over the arm in a crate. Smaller pieces of this same scene are shown on the screen and in the case. 78 THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH EGYPTIAN ROOMS THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH EGYPTIAN ROOMS THE EMPIRE (xVIIl-XXl DYNASTIES, 1580-945 B. C.) THE greater part of Egypt had been ruled by the alien Hyksos from their capital Avaris in the Delta for nearly a century before any rival with enough ambition arose to dispute their sway. As was to be expected, their tenure of the more dis tant southern provinces was less secure than that of the northern and it was a coalition of the princes of Upper Egypt, united and directed by the ruling family of Thebes, that first threw off the foreign yoke. The revolt, however, was protracted through several generations before a leader arose of sufficient force- fulness to carry the war into the enemy's country, and descending the river, lay siege to Avaris itself. Such a leader Ahmes I of Thebes proved himself to be and the history of Egypt entered with his acces sion in 1580 B. C. upon a period of Empire. Impelled by a vigorous impulse of expansion after ridding them selves of the foreign dominion, the Egyptians were brought into closer relationship than ever before with A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS the neighboring peoples of Asia and North Africa, and throughout nearly three centuries played a leading role upon the fast changing stage of the ancient Orient. After a vigorously conducted campaign, Avaris was taken, and the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt and pursued by the victorious Ahmes into Palestine. His rising power, however, was not viewed with unmixed favor by the rulers of the other Egyptian principalities and cities, and before he had brought the war of libera tion to a successful conclusion he was forced to put down a series of revolts against the growing prestige of Thebes. Both he and his immediate successor were engaged for several years quelling the rebellions in the valley of the Nile, expelling the foreigners who had encroached on Egyptian territory during her period of weakness, and recovering the provinces of Nubia which had been won by the kings of the twelfth dynasty and lost under their enfeebled successors. At this time Palestine and Syria were split into innumerable independent city-states, constantly at war with one another and with the declining kingdom of Babylon, and yet actively engaged in manufacturing and in trading with all the Orient from the Islands of the /^gean to the Persian Gulf. Ahmes had pursued the Hyksos into Palestine and proved invasion practicable. Amenhotep I and Thothmes I, at the head of a now thoroughly efficient army, each made a raiding cam paign through Palestine into Syria as far as the Eu phrates River, collecting booty and so spreading the fear of the Egyptian arms that they could depend on the continued payment in the future of the annual tribute they demanded. So successful was the issue 82 THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH ROOMS of these first expeditions that a half century passed with but little effort necessary on the parts of Thothmes I and his successors Thothmes II and Hatshepsut to maintain their prestige in nearer Asia. But a laxly exerted control over an area so extended and inhabited by such turbulent peoples as that on which the early eighteenth dynasty kings levied tribute was bound to be resisted in course of time, and Thothmes HI on attaining sole power in Egypt saw the immediate necessity of strengthening the occupation abroad. Foremost of Egypt's greatest ruling family, Thoth mes HI showed abilities as a conqueror, organizer, and administrator never rivaled throughout her history. His name became not only a byword throughout the Orient for generations but in Egypt almost synonymous with "power" and as such was inscribed as a talisman on scarabs at least as late as Sai'te times. In seventeen masterful campaigns he defeated and dispersed the federation of hostile princes organized by the kings of Megiddo and Kadesh, deposed the disaffected rulers and replaced them with others on whom he could de pend, and established garrisoned bases of supply at advantageous points. Chief among these latter in importance were the coast towns of Phoenicia, which, in supplying the Egyptians with fleets for the trans portation of their armies, made of them a maritime power. As despot of Palestine, Syria, and northern Mesopotamia, with the Islanders of the Mediterranean, the now rising Hittites of Asia Minor, and even the king of Babylon currying his favor, Thothmes 1 1 1 made Egypt the first power of the ancient world and the Egyptian Empire a reality. For over a century the 83 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS kings ruling from Thebes exerted their sway from the Fourth Cataract of the Nile in Nubia to the upper Euphrates, a distance of fifteen hundred miles. Such abortive attempts to revolt as were made by the prov inces in the reigns of the successors of the Conqueror, Amenhotep II and Thothmes IV were easily frustrated, and when Amenhotep III ascended the throne in 1411 B. C. he was recognized as undisputed ruler by the entire Empire. The isolation in which the Egyptians had heretofore existed except for a brief time under the soldier kings of the twelfth dynasty was a thing of the past. They came in contact with foreigners not only in their wars and trading expeditions abroad, but Egypt itself was flooded with Asiatic and Nubian captives, with mer cenaries, merchants, ambassadors and hostages, and even with the courts of the foreign princesses who were married into the families of the Pharaohs. The wealth coming in as plunder and tribute had swelled to enor mous proportions, and the foreign traders, enjoying unusual prosperity under the widespread peace en forced in the Empire, found in Egypt a new and pro ductive market for their goods. Nubia supplied gold, ivory, skins, cattle, ebony, and grain; silver, copper, lead, and semi-precious stones came from Cyprus, the Islands, Syria, and Sinai; cedar was procured in the Lebanon, and aromatic woods and spices from Arabia and Punt, while the Phoenicians and Cretans brought metal work and textiles. Of all these riches a disproportionately great amount became the property of the king. The founders of the eighteenth dynasty, as we have seen, had assured their 84 THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH ROOMS position by crushing all rival claimants to power and in so doing had destroyed the ancient landed nobility which had played so important a part since the Old Kingdom. Backed by their victorious armies the successive rulers had then turned their efforts to cen- FIG. 40. QUARTZITE HEAD OF AKHENATEN (hEAD-DRESS RESTORED) XVIII DYNASTY tralizing all the functions of the state in their own persons, delegating the powers formerly wielded by the feudal princes to appointees of their own from among their soldiers and courtiers over whom they could retain direct control. Thus absolute in their power and commanding unprecedented wealth, they were able to 85 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS maintain a greater state of splendor and opulence than ever before, and the members of their courts imitated their luxury. The eariier kings of the dynasty were occupied in repairing the ruin which had come over the entire country since the Middle Kingdom. The temples throughout the Valley were restored, and while all of them shared in the royal bounties, the policy of the successors of Ahmes was to glorify their home city of Thebes, unlike the twelfth dynasty kings who had founded a new capital of their own. Intent therefore on making Thebes the first city of the Empire each succeeding ruler enlarged and embellished its temples at Luxor and Karnak, and across the river at Gurneh built a mortuary temple in his own honor commem orating the chief events of his reign. Here was per formed after his death the funerary ritual as had been the custom in the old pyramid temples, but his body was laid away in the rock-cut tomb which each king carved for himself in the Valley of the Kings and elaborately decorated with scenes illustrative of the soul's journeyings in the after-life. In the hills and plains round about, the courtiers and officials were buried, and as time passed there grew up a vast city of the dead, with its priests and officials, temples and tombs duplicating the city of the living across the river. As the destruction of the old feudal nobility had wrought far-reaching changes in the social conditions, so did the steadily increasing royal patronage of the temples. The priesthood became a profession rather than a vocation participated in by the laity, and coin cident with the centralization of the functions of the 86 THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH ROOMS government in the king, the entire hierarchy was made more and more subject to the priesthood of the patron god of Thebes and of the royal family — Amon. All the various local elements of the religion tended to become unified. The old funerary texts were collected and amplified into the Books of the Dead, of the Under world, and of the Portals. Magical qualities were invented for the mythological writings and a host of sacred formulae, amulets and talismans came into popularity which were supposed to help surmount all difficulties in this world and in the next. At the same time both the policy of unification fostered by the priests of Amon and a semi-philosophical interpre tation of the myths tended to emphasize certain quali ties common to many gods of widely divergent origin, until the idea of a single god found favor with the more enlightened when the Empire was at its height. The monotheistic idea gained ardent supporters in Amenhotep IV, his mother Queen Tiy, the able and en ergetic wife of Amenhotep III, and others of his family. Ascending the throne as a youth, with imagination broadened by the far-reaching power he had inherited and with a sincere and poetic appreciation of the beautiful in nature, the young king turned all his efforts to promulgating and teaching a new religion. He con ceived his god as personifying the vital and beneficent forces of the sun and gave him the name of the sun-disk, Aton. Although it was a cult intelligible not only to the people of Egypt but to all the Empire, the con servative prejudices of his contemporaries and the jealousy of the priesthood, aroused by the loss of their own prestige, became serious difficulties. The young 87 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS reformer, therefore, soon came to an open rupture with the hierarchy, abandoned Thebes where the poly theistic religion was all powerful for a new city which he founded at Tell el Amarna, destroyed all traces of the older gods with iconoclastic fury, and even showed his abhorrence for them by changing his own name from Amenhotep to Akhenaten — "The Spirit of Aton." But it was a time when Egypt needed a strong and militant ruler rather than a religious reformer. With the energies of the king and the more forceful characters of the court engaged in the struggle between the old and new faiths, and the wealth of the country being employed in the building of the new capital, the whole imperial fabric of the conqueror kings became weakened and finally collapsed. The Hittites and the Beduin were feeling the first symptoms of a great migratory movement which was to envolve all the peoples of the Orient and they cast covetous glances on the provinces held by the Egyptians. All Syria, ever needful of a watchful control, began to seethe with rebellion under Akhenaten's lax and vacillating foreign policy, and al though he himself died before the final catastrophe, within an incredibly short time the hard-earned Empire was almost completely lost. Discredited by their reverses, his successors to the throne and to the leader ship of the Aton heresy became a prey to the priest hood of Amon. Two of them — Tut-ankh-amen and Ay — unsuccessfully tried to regain the favor of the old hierarchy by a return to orthodoxy, but their con cessions were disregarded and the conservative ele ments were not mollified until the priests of Amon had placed an appointee of their own upon the throne. THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH ROOMS They chose the general Horemheb, who expended all his energies furthering the reaction against the radical movement, and the triumph of the priesthood was so complete that its position was more firmly assured than it had ever been before. With Rameses I and Seti I, the founders of the nine teenth dynasty, began the second period of the Empire. In spite of the corrupting luxury of her material prosperity and the deadening influence of the now all powerful hierarchy, Egypt regained for a time some part of her former glory before she sank under the repeated assaults of her enemies within and without. Seti I made systematic efforts to recover the lost Asi atic provinces, but his wars with the Hittites, nowfirmly established in Northern Syria, were barren of result and he abandoned the attempt to dislodge them. He left the task at his death to his son Rameses II, the Great, a ruler whose boundless and grandiose ambition demanded vast wealth for its attainment. Entering with energy, therefore, upon the incomplete reconquest of the Empire, he regained Phoenicia and parts of Mesopotamia and waged successful war in Syria, until he too was checked by the Hittites and was forced to content himself with a sphere of influence noticeably smaller than that of his predecessors of the eighteenth dynasty. One of the most picturesque figures of Egyptian history, during whose long reign of sixty- seven years monuments were erected in every town of the country, Rameses II attempted with a display of magnificence to give an impression of undisputed power. But the Egyptians were growing effeminate and priest- ridden, the land was overrun with turbulent mer- 89 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIANROOMS cenaries and corrupt officials, foreigners were settling within the country, and there was an insincerity and hollowness to such pretensions which became evident upon the death of Rameses the Great. Gaining in boldness, the foreigners who were flocking into Egypt coveted not only the provinces of the Empire but even the Nile Valley itself. The Libyans west of the Delta made common cause with the pirates of the/Egean and the Mediterranean and began pred atory incursions into Lower Egypt. The Asiatic possessions, ever ready for a chance to regain their freedom, revolted again. For a while Egypt held her own under Mernephtah, but she steadily lost ground under the following kings whose wars of succession brought the country to a state of anarchy from which it was with difficulty delivered by Setnekht and Rameses III, the founders of the twentieth dynasty. Rameses 1 1 1 defied the changing conditions for a time but they were inevitable. Even the once powerful kingdom of the Hittites was swamped in the tides of migratory peoples, and in the inert hands of the Rame- sides of the later twentieth dynasty Egypt's empire crumbled away and was lost forever. It was then only a question of time before Egypt herself should become involved in the readjustment of races in the Orient. The country powerless at last at home as well as abroad, the throne fell prey to the priesthood to which it had owed so much since the eighteenth dynasty. The High Priest of Amon had been strengthened by the wealth and privileges granted to him by the kings of the nineteenth dynasty after the fall of Akhenaten's heresy to such an extent that he 90 i,S0Ji:¥* FIG. 41. SMALL LIMESTONE GROUP XVIII DYNASTY A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS became bold enough to make his position doubly secure by declaring it hereditary. A large part of the wealth of the country had been put at his command in return for the indispensable aid he accorded to the founders of the twentieth dynasty, until at last the High Priest Herhor felt himself powerful enough, at the time of a revolution in the Delta under Rameses XII, to seize the throne in Thebes. His successors made a matri monial alliance with the Lower Egyptian rebels which resulted in their inheriting the entire kingdom, and a dynasty of priest-kings — the twenty-first — ruled the declining country for a period until the Libyan settlers in Middle Egypt usurped the crown in turn from them, under the leadership of Sheshonk I in 945 B. C. The political and social history of Egypt under the Empire is closely paralleled by that of her arts. Both begin with the recovering of lost position at the expul sion of the Hyksos, followed by the stage of growth. and expansion with promise of an even greater future, after which succeeded the weakening and the failure to fulfill this promise and finally the decline and death of both the imperial and artistic impulses. With their independence and prosperity reestab lished by the early eighteenth dynasty, the Egyptians started to repair the damage done their monuments under the foreign dominion. For their inspiration and example they turned as naturally to the last preceding epoch of artistic activity — the Middle Kingdom — as the artists of the latter had turned in similar circum stances to the fifth and sixth dynasties. Throughout the formative period of the Empire, and even in the 92 THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH ROOMS early years of its height, all the essential conventions and characteristics of the twelfth dynasty were main tained so faithfully that one is occasionally at a loss to know to which of the two periods an object should be assigned. The so-called "proto-doric" canon of architecture was the favorite. Temples at Luxor, Medinet Habu, Deir-el-Bahri, Elephantine and in Nubia were still built with open porticos of polygonal columns and at Deir-el-Bahri there were copied even enclosure waUs with Horus-name panels similar to that from Lisht in the Sixth Room. In the temple reliefs the typical Middle Kingdom archaistic drawing, model ing, and minute attention to details were imitated with so great fidelity that an example such as the Punt scenes of Hatshepsut, shown in facsimile in the Seventh Room, has more analogies in twelfth dynasty sculpture than in that which was soon to follow. Sculpture in the round, although perhaps the first of the major arts to inaugurate original tendencies, started similarly, and even the minor arts were subject to the same con ditions. Thus we find the jewelry of Ahmes I and Aahotep essentially like that of Dahshur, and the glazes from the tomb of Thothmes IV and Deir-el-Bahri in the Sixth Room perpetuating in color and technique some of those of the Middle Kingdom in Room Four. The changed conditions in Egypt in the flourishing times of the Empire of Thothmes 1 1 1 and his successors were equally strongly reflected in the contemporary art. The ambition of the kings was to give evidence of the wealth and prosperity of their reigns in the magnificence of the monuments they erected. The priests were engaged in elaborating their rituals in 93 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS accordance with the spirit of pomp and display char acteristic of the times. And every one, from the king down to the humblest scribe, made all possible efforts to surround himself, both in this life and the next, with all the luxury which his new-found riches could afford him. The Egyptian had at his command the wealth of the entire Orient and to his hand came the work of artists as far from him in spirit and tradition as those of Crete and the neighboring islands. The tendency of the age was toward the independence and broaden ing of the imagination. As in religion this culminated in the nature-loving Aton monotheism, so in art it produced a naturalistic school which, starting with the reign of Amenhotep HI, steadily developed at Akhena ten's capital. Tell el Amarna. The complicated ritual of the professional priesthood and the desire for display on the part of the kings de manded a new type of temple architecture to give them scope, and the "proto-doric" form was abandoned. In this Amenhotep III was the principal innovator. The temple, fronted with massive pylons, was completely enclosed on all sides, and within, peristyle courts and hypostyle halls with colossal lotus and papyrus col umns became the main features. The increased un broken wall space, especially on the pylons, presented new problems to the draughtsman who designed the relief decorations. The primitive division of a scene into zones with the figures ranged in procession, such as we find as late as Hatshepsut's Punt reliefs, was not adapted to such a position, and the artists of Thothmes 1 1 1 attempted to solve the difficulty by simply enlarg ing a single motive — the king striking his captives — 94 THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH ROOMS to cover almost the entire field. Under Amenhotep III and Akhenaten an advance was made by trying to compose large scenes pictorially, and although de velopment ceased before perspective was attempted and the naive expedient was still retained of giving the chief figures prominence by drawing them large out of all proportion to the rest, yet a considerable advance was made by the nineteenth dynasty, and such scenes as that from Karnak represented by the cast in the Seventh Room were common. Pictorial composition and naturalism in drawing prob ably received their first impulse and the widest field for their development in the mural decorations of the dwellings of the Empire, of which examples are shown in the Sixth Room, from the Palace of Amenhotep III. Here, untrammeled by the rigid conventions of religious conservatism, the artist was encouraged to show a multitude of homely and natural scenes with all the realism of which he was master. With the increase of his powers of observation and perception he began gradually to free himself from the firmly established archaistic canons of drawing until the establishment of Akhenaten's naturalistic religion gave him a chance to show all that he had learned on the walls of the tombs and temples themselves. Sculpture in the round, already faithful in the portraiture of the head at least, by following on the same lines soon arrived at in dividuality of a marked order. Although it lacked per haps the striking vigor of the archaic periods, it achieved truth expressed with subtlety and refinement. These qualities are well exemplified in the portrait head of Akhenaten (Fig. 40), and the small group of the 95 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS priest with the man and boy probably done under one of his successors (Fig. 41,) both of which are shown in the Sixth Room. Even more marked was the emancipation which the minor arts of the period attained, for their development was influenced by still other factors. The simplicity of life in all classes under the older agricultural and feudal periods was corrupted by the luxury of the Empire. With furniture, dress, and articles of personal adornment becoming more ornate, more numerous, and of greater variety, the Egyptian accepted with en thusiasm every innovation from abroad. How far he' himself in turn influenced the arts of the peoples of the /^gean and Syria is beside the question in this hand book, but it is evident from such decorations as that of the ceiling from the Palace of Amenhotep HI in the Sixth Room (Fig. 42) that foreign elements were readily combined with Egyptian motives. Foreign competi tion stimulated all the minor arts. While it was par ticularly close in metal working, the Egyptian craftsman easily excelled in the purely native art of ceramics. A glance at the examples of polychrome glass and faience in the Sixth Room will show some of the infinite varieties of color and form produced and the innumer able new uses to which the materials were put. The artisan's greatest fault now became the facility of which he was master. To quantity of output and elaboration of type he sacrificed the painstaking care and ex cellence of execution of the earlier periods. It will be recalled that the radical movement in the religion resulted in the temporary wrecking of the Empire, and, discredited by this, its own downfall was 96 THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH ROOMS brought about in turn by the older priesthood and the conservative elements of the country. Everything tainted with heresy was outlawed and the naturalism of the art of Akhenaten's school was abhorred as thor oughly as his theology by his enemies. However, in FIG. .42. CEILING FROM THE PALACE OF AMENHOTEP III, PARTIALLY RESTORED, XVIII DYNASTY the following reaction there was no imitation of the style of a long past period as there had been in the twelfth and early eighteenth dynasties. The country possessed many architects and artists who retained the traditions of the Empire of Amenhotep HI, and as was inevitable there lingered in their work many traces 97 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS of the artistic revolution which had just passed. At first in the period of reform and promise under Horem heb and Seti I they produced conventional works, which though lacking in originality are near enough in point of time to the naturalistic school to be characterized by a delicacy and refinement which make them among the most beautiful of Egypt. A typical example of the statuary of the period is the head of Amon (Fig. 43) and some of the finest pieces of the reliefs in existence are those from the Abydos temple of Rameses I (Figs. 44 and 45), both shown in Room Six. The priests in their triumph and ultimate ascendency made every effort to return to the older order, and the art, becoming once more thoroughly orthodox, lost the spontaneity and originality of the late eighteenth dynasty and became as stereotyped and lifeless as the rule of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasty kings themselves. Examples of the relief of the period be fore it became thoroughly debased under the Priest- kings may be seen in the tomb-chamber of Sebek-mes opening off of the Sixth Room (Fig. 46). The material prosperity of the country under Rameses II retarded the decadence of the minor arts for some time so that gold and silver smiths' work, glass and faience in the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties are often on a higher plane of technical excellence, even if they lack in design some of the freshness and charm of the eighteenth. The Egyptian Expedition of the Metropolitan Museum has excavated two sites which are within the limits of the Empire. In clearing the pyramid of Amenemhat I at Lisht an interesting provincial town of the twentieth and twenty-first dynasties was 98 THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH ROOMS found covering the east side and extending around to the cemetery on the west. It would seem that the twelfth dynasty necropolis had fallen into decay and the pyramids had been stripped of their casings and broken open during the Hyksos dominion, and as time had passed a viUage had sprung up among the ruins. Although members of one of its families boasted the high-sounding titles of "royal wife" and "royal son" on a stela shown in Room Eight, the people were peas ants for the most part, engaged in agriculture and the manufacture of glass. Objects illustrating their lives are shown in the Sixth Room in Case A, and in Case C there is a set of bronze bowls which had been buried under the floor of one of the houses ; in Room Seven a series of tools and agricultural implements is collected together in Case S, while in Positive Frame 1 1 in the Fourth Room there are photographs of their burials in the twelfth dynasty tombs which they had plundered and reused. During the season of 1910-1 1 the Expedition obtained concessions from the Egyptian Government to excavate on the west side of the Nile at the site of the suburbs and cemeteries of the capital of the Empire, Thebes. A beginning was made with the Palace of Amenhotep 1 1 1 which had been the scene of incompleted excavations by Daressy in 1887 and by Newberry and Tytus in 1902. (Fig. 47.) Here it was that Amenhotep 1 1 1 had caused to be made an artificial lake over a mile long and half a mile wide for the amusement of his wife Tiy, and the palace built beside it was probably one to which excur sions were made by the king and court from Thebes. The members of the Expedition were able to trace with 99 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS a great deal of sureness a large part of the structure and to identify many of the offices and the harim. The plan on the wall of the Seventh Room shows the results of the first year's work and one can see in the building drawn in black the private apartments of the king and of eight of the ladies of the royal harim. Walls, ceil ings, and pavements in this part of the Palace had been brightly decorated with frescoes displaying not only conventional patterns (Fig. 42) but also motives from nature in the spirit of the realistic school of the day, now shown on the wall of the Sixth Room. Pottery, some of it elaborately decorated (Case E), was found in large quantities, and from the small village which had sprung up nearby to house the artisans employed in making glass and faience for the use of the court in teresting specimens were procured (Case B). Photo graphs of the excavations are shown in Positive Frame II in the same room. It is the purpose of the Expedi tion to finish this site during the coming winter of 191 1- 1 2 and then to begin excavations on parts of the Empire necropolis to the north of it. THE SIXTH EGYPTIAN ROOM CASE A contains the smaller objects found by the Museum's Expedition in the twentieth and twenty-first dynasty village at Lisht, from which site there are other objects in Case D in this room and in Case S in the next. Here there are shown toilet articles, beads, pendants and rings, and tools both of bronze and flint. The Egyptian was still using stone for knives, saws and sickle blades at least twenty centuries after metal had become common, but it must 100 TH E sixth ROOM be remembered that he had a supply of excellent flint ready to his hand, and it was only in comparatively recent times that he has been able to afford tools of metal as durable as those he could make of it. Of special interest is the comparison of the fragments of FIG. 43. HEAD OF A GRANITE STATUE OF AMON LATE XVIII DYNASTY polychrome glass from a factory on this site with those in Case B from the excavation by the Museum of a similar factory of the eighteenth dynasty near the Palace of Amenhotep HI. Under the Empire, glass was not blown but was molded on earthen cores while heated to a viscous state. The decoration was then lOI A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS applied to the exterior with drawn or rolled glass rods, which, being fused into the body of the vessel as horizon tal stripes, were dragged into curving and wavy bands with a pointed instrument. These two series of frag ments of vases and of rods taken together show the most characteristic types as well as the development which took place in the technique in the last four centuries of the Empire. Other objects from the Palace of Amenhotep 1 1 1 fill the rest of Case B. There are blue glazed tiles from wall decorations and inlaid furniture, beads in glass and faience, amulets and rings, all made in the factory which supplied the court, from the terra-cotta molds of which a selection is here arranged. The faience rings are innovations at this period, and judging from the quantities made on this site and their fragility it seems probable that they were intended merely as orna ments to be given to guests at banquets and to be worn only on such occasions. An interesting object found in a house near the Palace is a bronze menat, complete with beads attached. It was an emblem, Hke the sistrum, sacred to the goddess Hathor, around whose neck it was placed or in whose hands it was held in such scenes as the Abydos relief G in this room. In the cere monials of the worship of Hathor especially, the priest esses carried the menat and the sistrum both, and in the relief 1 one is shown on the left carrying flowers and a sistrum in her hand and a menat thrown over her arm. On the wall over Cases A and B are shown frescoes from the Harim of the Palace. The section of ceiling from the king's apartments is especially important from its similarity to contemporary Cretan and Myce- 102 FIG. 44. RELIEF FROM A MEMORIAL TEMPLE OF RAMESES I AT ABYDOS XIX DYNASTY A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS naean designs (Fig. 42). The spiral had been in use in Egypt from the Middle Kingdom, but the cow's head with the rosette is probably borrowed from the /^gean with which the kings of the Empire and Amenhotep HI especially had such close relations. The smaller paintings are from the supports of benches in the ward robes of the queens, where they are shown in position in photographs 10 and 11 of Positive Frame II. The drawings of the bull and the calf mark the degree of perception with which the artist of the period portrayed nature, and while the work is sketchy and the material precludes the possibility of high finish, there is a char acteristic truth and vigor in both of them. Copies of other decorations and the plan of the Palace are shown at A in the Seventh Room, pottery from the same site in Case E in this room, and materials from other palaces in Case D. In Case C is a masterpiece of the realistic school of the late eighteenth dynasty, a red quartzite portrait head of the heretic king Akhenaten about one third life size. (Fig. 40.) The face only, from which the inlaid eyes and eyebrows are missing, is original, it having formed part of a now lost statue made up of several different materials. It should be studied for the absolute fidelity of the portraiture and the exqui site subtlety of the modeling. The upper part of Case D contains metal work chiefly from the second half of the Empire. On the top shelf there are gold and silver vases, pitchers and strainers, which formed part of a temple treasure discovered by natives under the ruins of Bubastis in 1906. Other examples from the same find now in the Cairo Museum 104 THE SIXTH ROOM bear the cartouches of Rameses II and of Tausert of the nineteenth dynasty. On the lower shelf are five bronze bowls from a set of nine which were so treasured by one of the inhabitants of the twentieth dynasty village at Lisht that he buried them in a broken pot under the floor of his house. There they were found by the Museum Expedition in 1907 and the remainder of the set placed in the Cairo Museum. Near them FIG. 45. DETAIL FROM TEMPLE-RELIEF OF RAMESES I REPRESENTING THE UNION OF UPPER AND LOWER EGYPT XIX DYNASTY are bronze pitchers, bowls and a libation vase of the eighteenth dynasty, mostly from Egypt Exploration Fund excavations at Abydos. In the west side of this case are shown faience dec orations from Empire palaces. Among them is a blue tile on which there is drawn under the glaze a man driving a two horsed chariot with conventionalized tree designs filling the background. The simplicity and certainty of the lines and the extreme delicacy and spirit of the drawing is typical of the best work of the middle eighteenth dynasty just preceding the naturalistic school. The tiles, rosettes and other dec orative units from the Palace at Tell-el-Yehudiyeh show the development in the technique of ceramics in 105 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS the reign of Rameses HI, by whose time the usually monochrome faience of the eighteenth dynasty wall decorations had been supplanted by tiles elaborately formed of mosaics of many colors representing intricate designs and even human figures, fused under one glaze. The opposite side of the case contains the minutiae of house furnishing: parts of draughtboards, mirrors, vases and tubes for ointments and kohl, and sticks for applying the latter to the eyebrows and eyelids. Here there is shown also a limestone ostrakon bearing a medical recipe written in hieratic. Case E contains pottery from the Palace of Amen hotep III which, characteristically of the period, is elaborately decorated. The uses to which pottery was placed in ancient Egypt were infinite, and in the store rooms of this palace the Museum Expedition found quantities of fragments of jars with labels written on them in hieratic showing that they had been used for several kinds of wines, oils and potted meats. Most of those in this case were probably intended to be used at banquets where they would be brought in decked with garlands as in the facsimiles of Thoth-em-heb's tomb paintings shown at C in the Seventh Room. Here the most notable are the amphora with the drawing of an ibex whose head and neck rise up in relief, and the pot painted with birds flying among the lotos flowers. On the south wall at F and H are shown two exam ples of early eighteenth dynasty sculpture; the former the bust from a statue of a man and the latter that from a statue of a queen, both of black granite. They are done in the rather restrained but dignified style of the period that was still under archaistic influences. 1 06 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS On the same wall at G and I and on the north wall of the room at V and W are shown four reliefs from a temple of Rameses I at Abydos presented by J. Pier- pant Morgan. In addition to their mortuary temples at Thebes dedicated to Amon, the first four kings of the nineteenth dynasty built memorial temples at Abydos dedicated to the patron god Osiris. The reign of Rame ses I being of the briefest, the monuments started by him were finished under his son Seti I by a school of artists whose handiwork is evident in these reliefs and in those of Seti's temples at Abydos and Gurneh and of his tomb in the Valley of the Kings. To a degree equal to that of any others, these reliefs exemplify the characteristic fineness of the art of this school, at a time when the orthodox reaction was paramount. Representing as they do the triumph of the conventional school just before its decadence all of the strictest canons of Egyp tian Art are here observed, but they are interpreted with a suppleness and flexibility of line and a softness and delicacy of modeling which clothes them with a beauty never excelled. The Scenes G and I are almost continuous. At the extreme right is the triad of deities, Osiris, I sis, and Hathor, within a shrine regarding the king Rameses I, who makes offerings to them while his queen Sitra shakes a pair of sistra. Behind her, extending into the second section, advance a procession of priests bearing enormous bunches of flowers and priestesses carrying flowers, the sistrum and the menat. All are shown in the elaborate pleated linen costumes of the Empire, drawn with infinite fineness and detail. In the Scene U the king Rameses I is shown seated 1 08 ta X HH< o H <><: u X uMI H A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS upon a throne beneath which stand Nile-gods who bind together the lily and papyrus typifying the Two Lands of Egypt (Fig. 45) . Before the king there is a list of offerings and priests who perform the funeral ritual. In the scene W (Fig. 44) the two kings Rameses I and Seti I make offerings to Osiris and to I sis before the ancient totem of Abydos, the box in which the heart of Osiris was kept, mounted on an upright pole in the midst of an elaborate stand. In the middle of the east side of the room are Cases K and L with a collection of scarab seals of all periods from their origin in the early Middle Kingdom down to Roman times, here shown together for purposes of comparison. The series begins on the north side of Case K with scarabs bearing royal names arranged chronologically, followed on the south side with those bearing private names. Then come the types with purely decorative motives originating with the ninth to eleventh dynasties and extending down with the motto scarabs of the Empire to Roman times in the lower part of this case and both sides of the next. A part of this series was described in the Murch Collec tion Catalogue (supplement to the Bulletin, Met. Mus. of Art, January, 191 1). Between the scarab cases are two small statuettes M and N. The former (Fig. 41) shows a priest with shaven head and nude torso, leading forward an official or soldier in curled wig and short sleeved linen garment, and a httle naked boy with plaited hair. The charm ing simplicity and naturalness of the figures in this group are one of the most pleasing characteristics of the school of Akhenaten, under one of whose immediate 1 10 THE SIXTH ROOM successors it was probably done. In the other group a man and his wife, clothed in the pleated garments worn by the figures in the Abydos relief, are seated side by side on low chairs. While lacking the direct ness and spontaneity of the first group, this little statue shows how in some of their smaller works the FIG. 48. POTTERY FROM A ROYAL TOMB LATE XVIII DYNASTY artists at the outset of the nineteenth dynasty re tained much of the delicate naturalism of their im mediate predecessors. The figures sketched in yellow on the background probably represent d>aug-hters of the couple. In the middle of this wall is the entrance to the offer ing chamber of the Tomb of Sebek-mes (Fig. 46). He held office, probably under the kings of the twentieth dynasty, as Superintendent of the Two Houses of Silver A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS and the Two Houses of Gold, or High Treasurer of Upper and Lower Egypt, and was buried at Razigat south of Thebes on the west side of the Nile. On the left side of the chamber Sebek-mes pours out a libation to Anubis and recites the prayer inscribed in front of him. On the opposite wall in the upper register he is led before the twenty-four gods who sit in judgment on the dead, and below is shown his funeral procession. To the right is the mummy on a canopied sledge, with Anubis pro tecting it, drawn by seven men, while a funeral dance is being performed in front by women. Beyond, the body having arrived at its destination, it is carried to the Goddess of the West, who welcomes it with strips of fresh bandages in her hands. On the back wall of the chamber Sebek-mes is seen pouring ointment on the heads of statues of Anubis and Osiris. Characteristic of the period, all the scenes are of a religious nature, the emphasis being entirely on the life of the future, while the deceased's life in this worid is passed over in silence, and as a further result of the priestly domina tion of the late Empire there is seen a marked falling off in the quality of the relief. In the center of the room in Case P are collected to gether some of the finer small objects of the Empire which display graphically the infinite variety and showy ornateness typical of the minor arts of the period. In the middle there are grouped a number of polychrome glass vases, mostly of the twentieth dynasty, which show in their completeness the types of which the frag ments in Case A were formerly part. A particularly interesting piece is the fragmentary jar in an opaque black and white glass breccia which is a surprisingly 112 the si XTH ROOM good imitation of stone. At one end of the case are shown finger rings in gold, bronze and faience, at the side a series of pendants and amulets of the Tell-el- Amarna period, and the rest of the case is devoted to beads and necklaces. A characteristic of the Empire, FIG. 49. FLORAL NECKLACE LATE XVIII DYNASTY as distinct from the early eighteenth dynasty, which follows the Middle Kingdom style so closely, is the great popularity of glass as a material and its dispro portionate frequency as compared to glazes and stones. There are shown in Case R, on the east side of the room and in the rear side of Case S, pottery (Fig. 48) and other objects from a royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings presented by Theodore M. Davis. A burial having been made there sometime in the reign of Tut- ankh-amen after his sixth year, the tomb was later 113 a HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS broken open by thieves, who unwrapped the mummy, burned and destroyed the furniture and broke all this pottery in which offerings had been placed. The plundering was discovered eventually by the priests of the necropolis, who gathered up all the fragments in the violated tomb and carefully packed them away in large barrel-like pots, which they reburied nearby. On the lower shelf of Case R are shown smaller pots, with the seals of the priests still stamped on their mud stoppers, containing similar material from another tomb. In Case S there is a piece of mummy cloth from the first tomb, bearing a note in hieroglyphic of the sixth year of Tut-ankh-amen, and his name appears again on one of the clay seals from vases or boxes from the same place. Of unusual interest are the garments of ex ceedingly fine linen and the three floral collars from this find (Fig. 49). From banquet scenes in tombs such as that of Thoth-em-heb, shown at C in the Seventh Room, we know that it was the custom to present each guest at a banquet with such a necklet of flowers to wear on the occasion, and in these examples it can be seen how the flowers, leaves, berries and beads were sewn on to a backing made of a semicircular sheet of papyrus. Similar collars served as models from the Middle Kingdom down for bead collars like those of Senbtes in the Fourth Room. The top shelf of Case S contains glazed cups and dishes from different periods within the Empire, from which may be singled out the graceful lotus goblets with ornate decoration and the green offering cup with the cartouches of Rameses 1 1 which comes prob ably from his tomb furnishings. Below there is a 114 THE SIXTH ROOM row of blue faience objects — ofl'ering vases, amulets and ushabtis — found by Theodore M. Davis in the tomb of Thothmes IV — which taken in conjunction with the fragments of votive dishes from Deir-el-Bahri in the same case present most of the characteristics of this class of ceramics before the reign of Amenhotep III. Nearby are shown foundation deposits from both the tomb of Hatshepsut in the Valley of the Kings and her mortuary temple at Deir-el-Bahri, comprising models of the tools and implements used in their construction In Case V, between the windows of this room, there is a small recumbent sphinx of Thothmes III, in which the subtly conceived convention of personifying the power and majesty of the king by combining his por trait with a lion's body is treated with the dignity and reserve which mark the best works of the earlier eigh teenth dynasty school. The Head of Amon (Fig. 43) in the corner at X gives evidence of the more dehcate and sympathetic conceptions inherited from the Aton heresy which were current in the first years after the return of the art to the orthodox traditions. THE SEVENTH EGYPTIAN ROOM ON THE wall at A there are shown copies of ceiling decorations, the restoration of a throne dais and a plan of the Palace of Amenhotep III, cleared by the Museum Expedition in 1910-1 1. A short description of the Palace and of material from it has been given above. The two watercolor drawings at C are full sized fac- similies, made by a branch of the Museum Expedition, of paintings in the tomb at Gurneh which Thoth-em-heb 115 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS usurped from a steward of the High Priest of Amon, Thoth, of the early eighteenth dynasty. In the paint ing above offerings have been placed before the deceased and his wife and below them is a scene from the funeral banquet. While the guests in the latter are portrayed with a certain amount of liveliness, the women holding each other's hands and smelling each other's flowers, they are treated with a great deal of formality, as was considered proper with the more important figures in a composition. The nascent tendency to naturalism, however, is evident in the drawing of the little maids who move about among the guests, pouring water on their hands and placing garlands about their necks. Here the artist takes more liberties with the conventions, posing his figures with freedom and accuracy and putting a great deal of charm into his drawing. Of interest for the study of the pottery in the Sixth Room are the jars decked with wreaths, flowers and vines shown in the banquet haU. The three other wall paintings from the earlier tomb of Nekht, shown in facsimile at D on the other side of the staircase, develop the same characteristics. Here, too, the principal personages are austerely drawn in the scenes showing Nekht and his wife receiving offerings in the pictures above and on the left of the lower row. But the picture on the right, which is continuous with this last, deals with minor characters and they are treated with much greater freedom — in the case of the gray-haired men with distended stomachs in the vineyard, almost in a spirit of caricature. Case G contains objects connected with the funerary cults of the period. Above is shown a series of ushabtis ii6 FIG. 50. INNER COFFIN OF KHONSU XX DYNASTY A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS in wood, terra-cotta and faience, bearing the names of private personages, members of the royal families and kings. Many of those with brifliant blue glaze come from the find of royal mummies made at Deir-el-Bahri in 1 88 1. In the intermediate period before the rise of the Seventeenth Dynasty the statuettes and models of servants which had been placed in tombs since the Old Kingdom to supply the wants of the dead had been abandoned with the new conception of the future life which was coming into being. This ceased to be con sidered as simply a repetition of mortal life, and as the religion of the Empire developed the Underworld became more and more a mystic realm with difficulties to be overcome and tasks to be accomplished. Small mummiform statues of the deceased had originated in the Middle Kingdom, and the custom grew up of writing upon them formulae from the Book of the Dead which insured their responding when called upon as sub stitutes for the deceased in the tasks assigned to him, and the Egyptian word for "answerer" — ushabti — has been taken as their designation. Below are shown small funerary statuettes, alabaster and other stone toilet vases from tombs, canopic jars and jar heads and terra-cotta cones stamped on the end with the names and titles of the deceased, which were placed in great numbers in Theban tombs of the Empire period. The practice of mummification which developed in the Middle Kingdom reached a high pitch of perfection under the Empire. The safeguards against the destruc tion of the corpse after death became greatly elabor ated, and every care was taken that the spirit have THE SEVENTH ROOM for all time a body for its habitation. An example of a twentieth dynasty mummy is contained in Case H, partially unwrapped so as to show its preservation and the wax plate covering the opening in the left side of the abdomen, by means of which the viscera were re moved before being placed in Canopic jars. Photo graphs of royal mummies of the Empire period are shown in the Positive Frames in the Tenth Room. Cases H to L contain coffins and other objects from contemporary tombs which illustrate the same elabora tion of care with which the body was treated. The anthropoid coffin, which purported to be a likeness of the mummy it contained, has been seen to be an in novation of the Middle Kingdom. In the dark period preceding the Empire the Egyptians abandoned the custom of placing the body on its side — the last sur viving trace of the prehistoric contracted position — and the mummiform coffin was now constructed to lie on its back. At the same time the decoration which had originally been limited to the portrayal of orna ments actually placed on the body, with possibly a simple prayer to Osiris for the perpetuation of food and drink offerings for the deceased, became elaborated with the addition of figures of the principal gods of the Underworld painted on the exterior. By the late years of the Empire these originally simple additions had multiplied until they closely covered the entire coffins within and without, and the now highly mystical and complicated mythology of the future life was illustrated with great fulness. An interesting innovation at this time was the inner lid, such as that in the coffin of Iti-neferti,which shows 119 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS the lady clothed in the white pleated linen dress of the Empire, with ornate floral collar covering her breast and elaborate curied wig falling upon her shoulders, lying extended above her actual mummy. This coffin, the set of double coffins of her son, the priest of the Theban necropolis Khonsu (Fig. 50), and the ushabtis, boxes and pottery from their tomb shown in Cases I, J, and K are among the best examples of their kind in ex istence. They form part of the contents of an untouched tomb made by the priest Sen-nezem, father of Khonsu and husband of Iti-neferti, for himself and his family in Gurnet Murai, opposite Luxor, probably in the reign of Rameses V. It was discovered by Maspero in 1886, at which time the objects here shown were purchased from the Egyptian Government by the Metropolitan Museum. On the wall at N is a cast of one of the reliefs of Seti I commemorating his wars in Syria which he caused to be carved on the north exterior wall of the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak. The king Seti I mounted in his chariot presses into the thick of the battle, rout ing his enemies, the Asiatics, with his death-dealing arrows and driving them in confusion into their city of Canaan. The scene has already been mentioned above as one of the typical examples of the temple reliefs of the later Empire. We see in it the characteris tic emphasis into which is thrown the figure of the king and his horses by their great size and the boldness of their carving, and the primitive attempt at pictorial effect in the confused hordes of Asiatics and in the landscape on the extreme left with its mountains and castle, to which they flee. 120 THE SEVENTH ROOM At 0 there is a facsimile of part of the reliefs of Hats hepsut in her mortuary temple at Deir-el-Bahri which commemorate the expedition she sent to Punt. They have been quoted above as examples of the school of the early eighteenth dynasty and as such should be compared with the Middle Kingdom sculptures in the Fifth Room and contrasted with the Karnak cast just described. The drawing conforms to all of the earlier conventions, but the artist has not felt their limitations so much as to lose the liveliness and animation in the boat scenes, and through his lavish love of detail he has crowded in incidents and objects which give it a never failing interest. An explanation of the scene is given in the label at the south end. Typical priestly statues of the eighteenth and nine teenth dynasties are shown below on the Pedestals Q and R. The convention of showing the subject squatting down, tightly wrapped in a mantle, was wel comed as giving an added area for the inscription of formulae now of growing importance, and no pretence at life-likeness was attempted except in the heads and the summarily represented hands. Case S contains pottery from early eighteenth dynasty tombs, mostly at Abydos, and from work men's houses in the Valley of the Kings dating from the later Empire. There is also shown an interesting series of tools and implements connected with daily life, from the twentieth dynasty village at Lisht, and objects used in building and the trades from different sites. THE EIGHTH EGYPTIAN ROOM sootiz< >- o u a:Hso THE EIGHTH EGYPTIAN ROOM twenty-second to THIRTIETH DYNASTIES (945-332 B. C.) AND PTOLEMAIC PERIOD (332-30 B. C.) THIS room is devoted principally to the works of the twenty-second to thirtieth dynasties and of the Ptolemaic period, although a few earlier and later objects have for special reasons found a place here. With the final decline of the Empire in the twelfth century B. C, the great days of native Egyptian rule and of conquest abroad were past. One weak dynasty succeeded another for more than four hundred years — the priest-kings of the twenty-first, and the foreign rulers, Libyans and Ethiopians, of the twenty-second to the twenty-fifth dynasties. Then came a brief revival of Egyptian prosperity and prestige under the Egyptian Psamtik I and his successors of the twenty- sixth dynasty. Afterward the land fell a prey to the Persians (twenty-seventh dynasty). The twenty- eighth to thirtieth dynasties of the Manetho lists were Egyptian, but count little as an interruption of foreign domination, since they endured only about sixty years and were not at first wholly free from the Persian yoke. 125 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS The Persians again gained control for a brief space, only to yield it to Alexander the Great, who took Egypt in 332 B. C. In the partition of his empire, Egypt fell to one of his generals, Ptolemy, the founder of the line of Ptolemies who ruled until the land became a Roman province thirty years before the beginning of the Christian era. During these later periods the capital was not Thebes, but one or another of the Delta cities, the center of power being thus shifted to guard the northern frontier. The brilliant era of the Saites (twenty-sixth dynasty) was contemporary with the colonial expansion and growing power of the Greek states in the latter part of the seventh and the early part of the sixth century B. C, and was marked by an influx of Greeks into Egypt, both as mercenary soldiers, forming the strength of the Pharaoh's army, and as merchants. The twenty- sixth dynasty saw also a remarkable revival of arts and learning. Of the architecture of the period we know little, but if the current theory be true that certain forms of capitals well known in the Ptolemaic period had their origin then, there was greater origi nality displayed in the buildings than in the sculpture. The latter, though achieving works of considerable merit, was for the most part archaistic in character, being one manifestation of the interest felt in Egypt's past. The Old Kingdom pyramids, now two thousand years old, were repaired and the services of their temples reestablished. The titles borne by noblemen of the pyramid age were revived and bestowed on sup porters of the Saite monarchs. Early religious texts were studied and the scribes practised the ancient 126 THE EIGHTH ROOM hieroglyphs, now unintelligible to the mass of the people. In ordinary usage, a cursive writing, demotic, had developed from, and replaced hieratic, the abbre viated form of hieroglyphic. The eariier foreign kings, Libyans and Ethiopians, became completely Egyptianized, adopting the customs and religion of the land over which they ruled. But FIG. 52. EXCAVATIONS AT THE TEMPLE OF HIBIS IN THE KHARGA OASIS SEASON 1909- I9IO the Persians, with the exception of Darius I, were far from conciliatory, often wounding the religious sensi bilities of their subjects, and thus making themselves hated as no oppressors before them had been. How ever, the one important monument of their time extant in Egypt, the temple of Hibis in the Kharga oasis — a temple which it has been the good fortune of this museum to excavate — is completely in the Egyptian style. On its walls the Persian king as official head of 127 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS the State religion is shown in an attitude of reverence before the Egyptian gods! Not a few larger and smaller monuments of the thir tieth dynasty survive, testifying, for instance, to the building activity of Nectanebo I in the Kharga oasis and of Nectanebo 1 1 at Phils. In style they anticipate the work of the early Ptolemies. The Greeks were wise enough when political power fell to them to propitiate the Egyptians. In assuming a sympathetic attitude toward the national religion, they adopted the surest means to favor with the native population. The priests were won over because the Ptolemies reestablished the old temple revenues which had fallen in abeyance, and encouraged the building of temples. Works in Egyptian style from this period are abundant, exhibiting certain modifications which were the natural sequence of tendencies developed in the periods immediately preceding. Elaborate floral capitals, screen walls between the columns of the front of the hypostyle, the loss of the clearstory are all char acteristics of these late temples. The reliefs show con siderable projection, crowded composition, and flabby, inaccurate modeling. Some of the minor artistic ob jects, however, have a certain beauty and are good in technique. An important school of Greek sculpture arose in the new capital, Alexandria, and works of mixed style testify to the influence of Greek and Egyp tian artists upon each other. The most prominent object in the Eighth Room is the capital of fine-grained sandstone from the temple of Hibis in the Kharga oasis (frontispiece). It is of 128 THE EIGHTH ROOM the thirtieth dynasty, being a part of the portico erected before the Persian temple by Nectanebo I, first king of that dynasty. A German scholar. Professor Borchardt, has pointed out that the design of this type of capital is derived from two species of papyrus, the common Cyperus papyrus and Cyperus alopecuroides. The two species are readily distinguished by the bracts sur rounding the umbel, those of the common papyrus being very short and the others very long. On the pedestal supporting the capital are exhibited a plan of the temple and photographs of herbarium specimens of the two species of papyrus, of common papyrus growing, and of other similar capitals. Our capital has the distinction of being the earliest of its kind extant and of having its harmonious colors well preserved. The glass positives at the windows illustrate the excavations of the Museum Expedition in the Kharga oasis (Fig. 52). Positives 4-7 in Frame I show various stages in the uncovering and removal of the composite papyrus capital referred to above. The concession of the Kharga oasis gives opportunity for work in the later periods corresponding to that afforded by the Lisht and Theban sites for the older periods. Already the work on the temple of Hibis, in the seasons of 1909-10 and 1910-11, has been very rewarding. In the clearing of the temple, an enclosure wall, hitherto unknown, which was added in the Ptolemaic period, and some new reliefs and inscriptions were recovered. Architectural drawings and plans have been made, also a complete photographic record, supplemented by hand copies of walls still retaining their colors, which win make it possible, in time, to publish the 129 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS temple minutely and accurately. The oasis contains further a number of temples, Ptolemaic and Roman, a Roman town site on which work has been started, an FIG. 53. SCULPTOR S MODEL LATE DYNASTIC OR PTOLEMAIC FIG. 54. SCULPTOR S MODEL LATE DYNASTIC OR PTOLEMAIC important Roman fortress, and Coptic monasteries and tomb-structures. Thus there is scope for much future activity within this concession. At the right are two capitals of coarse sandstone, late Ptolemaic or Roman, from the island of Philae. They 130 THE EIGHTH ROOM are interesting for comparison with the Kharga capital, their design being a modification of that seen in the finer, eariier piece. Between them is a table of offer ings which bears the name of Shep-en-Upet II, sacer dotal princess of Thebes at the close of the Ethiopian FIG. 55. SCULPTORS MODEL HEAD XXVI DYNASTY supremacy. It was reported to have come from Medinet Habu, where this princess had a chapel. How ever that may be, it illustrates the rather poor work of the period, the Ethiopians having acquired Egyptian culture very imperfectly. The hieroglyphs are poorly cut with some mistakes in the forms. On the left of the capitals are three later stelae, one of them a votive 131 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS tablet to the goddess Nut. Near the door to the Sev enth Room are some funerary stelae of about the time of the fall of the Empire, or even a little earlier. One of these, the stela of a man who was a "King's Son" and a " King's Scribe," Hapu, and his mother, was found in the Museum Excavations at Lisht. Wall Case A contains a selection of the bronzes belonging to the department. Nearly all of these fall within the period from the beginning of the twenty- sixth dynasty to the end of Ptolemaic rule. The greater number are hollow cast; a few are solid. Most of the statuettes were dedicated in sanctuaries after the Greek fashion. The custom, however, antedates Greek influence in Egypt. The statuettes represent Egyptian gods. Among these, Osiris, Isis, and Harpocrates are the most common. The figures are in wholly human form, or human with animal's head, or are animals symbolizing gods. Some of the statuettes have rings for suspension, but it is hard to credit the statement ocasionally made that these, even the heavier ones, were worn about the neck. Another class of bronzes consists of boxes of varying size used for the interment of animals and birds. Usually there is a figure on top of the box of the creature whose bones are inclosed within. Two especially interesting bronze statuettes occupy special floor cases near the main case. One of these is an admirably executed figure of the goddess Neith; the other, a statuette of Osiris with its original wooden base. Floor Case B and Table Case C are occupied with miscellaneous small objects, the majority of them of glazed stone or glazed frit. In the floor case attention 132 THE EIGHTH ROOM may be called especially to the figure of a cynocephalus sitting, with knees drawn up, on the neb-sign. It is of Hght blue color and of the finest twenty-sixth dynasty work. One entire shelf in this case, is given to objects from the Greau Collection, lent by Mr. J. Pier- pont Morgan. In the same case, another interesting object is a model of a sistrum. At the left on the east wall of the room are two stelae, the larger and more important dating from the reign of Osorkon 1 (twenty- second dynasty). It has an eight-line inscription in hieratic. The remainder of the east wall is occupied with the reconstructed false door, a few arched ceiling blocks, and a panel from the tomb of Bek-en-Ranf. This man was a vizier and priest under Psamtik I. His tomb is at Sakkara and sixty years ago was one of the principal attractions there to tourists. It consists of a number of rock-hewn chambers which were once lined with thin blocks of finer limestone bearing religious texts and reliefs. The tomb was unfortunately attacked by plunderers and its decoration widely scattered. There are two small blocks in Berlin, a number in Lyons, and others in Chicago. The sarcophagus of Bek-en-Ranf is in the Archaeological Museum at Florence. The tomb was copied in detail by Lepsius in the year 1843. Photographs of plates from the Denkmaeler aus Aegyp- ten und Aethiopien are placed nearby showing the condition in which Lepsius found it. There is also an enlargement from an old wood-cut of the interior, in which the ceiling blocks now here appear in position. In front of Bek-en-Ranf's false door are two statu ettes of hard stone. The one on the right is of diabase 133 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS and is probably thirtieth dynasty work. It is from Memphis and portrays a man named Tha-Hap-Emu. He had an imposing array of titles, among them, "General of the Army," "Greatest of the Great Ones," and "Hereditary Prince." The other statuette is a Ptolemaic work of basalt representing a priest, Ankh-pe-Khrod. On the other side of the central capital, between the frames of positives, has been placed a sandstone block from a screen wall. It is from Phils and is probably of the time of Nero; photographs on the pedestal suggest its probable relation in the temple architecture. As the only large piece of Roman date and Egyptian style which our collections contain, it has been placed in this room rather than among the objects of different character in the Roman Room. Floor Case P is occupied with sculptors' models (Figs. 53-55). These date from the later dynasties, twenty-sixth to thirtieth, and from the Ptolemaic period. They are distinctly academic in character, in contrast to the artists' sketches (Sixth Room) from the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, where the work is free and individual. These models are generally painstak ing productions and some are exquisite in their details. Evidently, from the numbers found in all parts of Egypt, every sculptor's workshop in this late period was well stocked with them. The various stages in producing a relief or a bust were thus clearly indicated and the learner was put through a definite routine. Perhaps, now and again, one of the pieces is the trial work of a pupil rather than a model. Designs on papyrus for use in studios have also come down to us, 134 THE EIGHTH ROOM though, because of their more perishable nature, they are not so numerous as the limestone models. A checkerboard of lines served now, as in earlier days, as the means of blocking out the design, and was especially FIG. 56. PORTRAIT HEAD OF XXVI DYNASTY useful in enlarging from model or papyrus sketch. The side of a square was the unit of measurement and it is interesting that in the late period figures were taller, being twenty-one units high instead of eighteen as formerly. In Table Case D are arranged all the small amulets of the eighteenth dynasty and later times, it being thought disadvantageous to break the collection into 135 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS more than two series. The eariy series may be seen in the Fourth Room. The number of objects repre sented by the amulets in this room is greater than in the eariy class. Nearly all merit attention by reason of beautiful material or delicate workmanship. Wall Case F is occupied by a selection of the later ushabtis of the collection. These little figures are now bearded and have a pillar at the back instead of being smooth-faced and modeled entirely in the round. Another difference is that one of the agricultural implements which they carry, the pick, has now the form of the metal, instead of the old, clumsy wooden implement. (Compare the earlier examples in the Seventh Room.) One especially fine ushabti, the gift of Amelia B. Edwards, in the days when interest in Egyptian antiquities was just awakening in this coun try, occupies a special floor case. It is inscribed for Uza-Hor, whose mother was named Shedet. The ushabti is from one of the finest sets known and was found by Professor W. M . F. Petrie in 1 889 in Uza-Hor's tomb at Hawara in the Fayum. When the custom of furnishing the dead with ushabtis first arose, a com paratively small number would suffice, but Uza-Hor had no less than four hundred. These were stacked in two niches, especially constructed for their reception in the walls of the tomb-chamber. At the left of the doorway to the Ninth Room is a finely modeled head of an Egyptian priest — a char acteristic Saite work (Fig. 56). It was found at Abydos under conditions that preclude the Ptolemaic date, which has sometimes been advanced for similar portrait heads of priests. Above it is a wooden relief of the head 136 THE EIGHTH ROOM of the goddess Hathor. At the right of the doorway, above, are three grave stelae of the Ptolemaic period with inscriptions in demotic. Below is a bust of a king, of breccia, broken from a statuette; this is also Ptolemaic. Of the same period is the fragment of temple relief at the left representing the head of the goddess Mut. The technique should be noticed, the sunken relief, which is peculiar to Egypt; it has been seen before in the tomb-chamber from Razigat, acces sible from the Sixth Room. THE NINTH EGYPTIAN ROOM FIG. 57. THE NINTH EGYPTIAN ROOM THE NINTH EGYPTIAN ROOM ROMAN PERIOD (30 B. C.-364 A. D.) AND BYZANTINE PERIOD (364-640 A. D.) THE material in this room is nearly all of the period of Roman and Byzantine rule in Egypt. The exceptions are some of the smaller Ptole maic objects, which stylistically belong here rather than in the Eighth Room, and a very few sculptured stones and textiles, which may fall later than the Arab conquest. In style, the break from all that has pre ceded is noticeable. Two main classes of material are included, the works in which late Greek style more or less strongly predominates and works produced in the service of the Christian church of Egypt. Egypt passed with very little disturbance into the power of the Romans, her internal organization being practically unchanged under the early emperors. She enjoyed two centuries of prosperity, then after Corn- modus (180-192 A. D.) fell on evil days, due largely to excessive taxation and religious strife. Reforms introduced by Diocletian (284-305 A. D.) brightened the situation for only a short time. At the partition 14J A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS of the Empire in 364 the land became a part of the East Roman Empire. In the three centuries during which Egypt was subject to the Byzantine emperors she was often threatened or attacked by enemies from without. Chief among these were the Blemmyes, a fierce nomadic tribe to the south, which had given trouble before; the Persians, and, at the last, the Arabs, who by 640 A. D. had virtual control of the country, although the Roman garrison in Alexandria did not surrender until two years later. Egypt was, in the earlier years, of great economic value to Rome as the source of the corn supply and also of many of the handsome building stones — por phyry, red granite, and others — which were lavishly used in the imperial city. Of the foreign population, however, the Greeks far outnumbered the Romans. The garrison was comparatively small and the land was much less strongly stamped with Roman ideas than were the colonies in Europe. The Roman rulers followed the example of the Ptolemies in doing reverence to the old Egyptian divinities, a procession of emperors, almost complete from Augustus to Caracalla, being portrayed in Egyptian dress on the walls of the various temples which they had built or decorated. The monuments and smaller objects in Egyptian style executed under the Romans have all the faults, usually exaggerated, of those of the Ptolemaic age (see relief in Eighth Room). Further, certain tasteless innovations were made, as the addition of bunches of dates to the palm capital. Turning to a field in which the Romans were supreme, there are evidences, principally in out-of-the-way places, of their engineering and organizing skill, wells, 142 THE NINTH ROOM underground water conduits, watch towers, and fort resses surviving. But the visitor to Egypt, if he stops to think of the land as a Roman province, looks in vain for any ruins of public structures, such as the amphitheaters and triumphal arches which com mand his attention in Spain and southern France. Some there were, of course, in Alexandria, Antinoopolis, and elsewhere, but there is little trace left of them, and FIG. 58. SCULPTURED MOLDING — COPTIC. VI CENTURY A. D. they probably were never so numerous as in other Roman lands. The minor artistic objects in a more or less pure classical style were here, as elsewhere in the Roman world, largely the work of Greeks, but with the difference that the artists had to cater only in small part to Roman taste, the majority of their patrons being of their own race, now, to some degree, Egyptian ized. The general artistic average of these objects is low. Yet, among the portrait panels from the Fayum and the plaster masks from Middle Egypt, there are occasionally excellent works. Although the invention of glass-blowing and of making glass mosaics is no longer credited to the Romans, they developed and made extensive use of these comparatively new tech nical processes. Tradition has it that Christianity was introduced 143 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS into Egypt by the apostle Mark in the reign of Nero (54-68 A. D.). By the time of Severus (193-21 1) the new sect was strong enough to seem a menace to the government and a persecution was ordered, which was followed by many another. Under Constantine in 323 A. D. Christianity became the state religion, and persecutions were now instituted for the purpose of rooting out the old faith. But Paganism was slow in dying. It survived long in the philosophical schools for which Alexandria was so famous, and in Upper Egypt, one important temple, that of Isis on the island of Philae, continued its rites, condoned perhaps for political reasons, until into the sixth century of our era. The Egyptian Christians, whether those of the first centuries of Christianity or their modern descendants, are called to-day Copts. The etymology of the word is not certain, though the explanation most commonly offered is that it is derived by way of Coptic and Arabic from the Greek word for Egyptian (AtyuTTTto?) . In belief, the Copts are Monophysites, having refused to accept the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon. The Coptic language is the last stage of ancient Egyptian, which had its written beginnings in the fourth millennium before Christ. Coptic developed in the third century A. D. and is still used in the ritual of the church in Egypt, although the speech of the Copts since the sixteenth century has been Arabic. In Coptic the ancient writing was abandoned and Greek letters were used instead. The only exceptions were a few demotic characters retained for sounds not occurring in the Greek tongue. Unlike the older writing, the vowels as well as consonants were expressed. 144 FIG. 59. PORTRAIT PANELS FROM THE FAYUM, ONE IN POSITION ON MUMMY. II-III CENTURIES A. D. A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS Conventual life seems to have had its origin in Egypt. Very eariy, individuals retired to the desert to lead a life of prayer and meditation. After a time, the hermits in one locality would unite in a brotherhood. By the fifth century there existed strong monasteries in and out of the Nile Valley, which controlled much cultivable land and had extensive fortress-like build ings designed to withstand the raids of desert tribes. These monastic structures were built of stone, baked bricks, or sun-dried bricks. In those of crude brick some stone was introduced, not only as ornament, but also in exposed situations, for instance in doorways. In architectural sculpture Coptic art reached its highest level. But for the inferior material — a soft limestone instead of marble — the Coptic friezes, carved mold ings, and capitals would vie in ssthetic appeal with those of Constantinople and Ravenna. In design they have much in common with Byzantine art and the Early Christian art of Syria; many of the motives used are traceable ultimately to Roman or Greek art. Ancient Egyptian influence is seldom seen in architectural sculpture, although it is found here and there in other branches of Coptic art. The ease with which the stone could be cut (almost as in wood-carving), as well as the danger of deep undercutting, fostered a tendency to work in two planes with only a little subsequent model ing of details. To a limited extent Coptic sculptures give the effect of the so-called "black and white compo sition," in which the ground tends to disappear in deep shadows having almost the value of an alternating pat tern (Fig. 58). Thereisstriking similarity in the capitals and carved doorposts of widely separated monasteries, 146 THE NINTH ROOM proving an interchange of ideas and probably of work men. The Coptic grave stelae, on the other hand, are the work of local schools and are for the most part FIG. 60. MUMMY WITH MASK OF A WOMAN NAMED ARTEMIDORA ABOUT 100 A. D. FIG. bl. DETAIL OF MUMMY WITH MASK OF A WOMAN NAMED ARTEMIDORA. ABOUT 100 A. D. crude. The Coptic sculptors were unsuccessful in their portrayal of the human figure, whether in relief or in the round, their few statues being very ugly. •47 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS The same, however, may be said of statues elsewhere at this time. The walls of the larger monasteries were extensively decorated in fresco, many of the patterns found in reliefs being used as borders and dadoes, and figures of saints being the main theme in the larger spaces. This work rarely reveals any special inspira tion or excellence of technique, but often has an im pressive dignity. Entering from the Eighth Room, the visitor familiar with the old collection will recognize, on either side of the doorway, the Roman bronze crabs from the New York obelisk. One of these has inscriptions in Greek and Latin which give valuable data about the removal of the obelisk from Heliopolis to Alexandria in the time of Augustus. It was then that the crabs, only two of which have been preserved, were placed under its corners. The obelisk itself dates from the reign of Thothmes HI in the fifteenth century B. C. Prints from old negatives, hung at the left of the doorway, show its appearance in Alexandria just before removal to this country. High above on the wall is a Roman Corinthian capital from Bubastis. This is of marble and may well be an imported piece, though one has the alternative of believing that only the material was imported and the capital was sculptured in Egypt. The boss seems to be unfinished. In design the capital resembles those of the peristyle of Diocletian's palace at Spalato (see reproduction on Screen A). Table Case P contains a variety of Ptolemaic and Roman objects, principally from town sites. Among 148 THE NINTH ROOM them are dice, pins, and small reliefs of ivory and bone; a pair of papyrus sandals; coins; and statuettes, medal lions from furniture, bells, needles, and scalpels of bronze. FipoR Case Q is filled with glass and faience objects, part of them from the Greau Collection. In Wall Case O is a series of plaster masks from the mummies of Greeks and Romans. These date from the middle of the first to the middle of the third cen tury A. D. All are incomplete, having lost the pieces that covered the breast and surrounded the back of the head. In the earliest of these masks, when in posi tion, the head was recumbent. Both in the modeling of the face and in the decoration of the parts below it, Egyptian influence may be traced. Then the head was gradually raised until finally it was modeled quite in the round. Such masks are wholly free from ancient Egyptian characteristics. We are fortunate in posses sing a mummy with mask in place illustrating the early type (Floor Case S, see below). A photograph in this case of a complete mask of the third century will help in visualizing the late type. The various masks differ greatly in merit. Many are mediocre and even disagreeable in appearance. A few, however, are de lightful. To the latter class belong, at the extreme right, the woman's head, with precise, slightly smiling features and formal curls; another head below it with elaborate coiffure; and, on the second shelf from the top, a fine head of a youth. The masks whose provenience is known have gen erally come from Middle Egypt. In the Fayum the usual practice was to place a painted panel over the head. But there is a record of a family tomb in the 149 A H A N D B O O K OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS Fayum in which the faces of the mother and two chil dren were covered with portrait panels and the faces of the father and one daughter with masks, proving that there was no hard and fast rule in this matter. In the center of the room. Floor Case R contains a mummy with portrait panel in position. (Detail in Fig. 59). It was found by Professor Petrie at Hawara in the season of 1910-11. The elaborate bandaging, forming diamond-shaped figures, is characteristic of Fayum mummies of this period. For an estimate of the quality of the painting, the detached portraits on Screens B and C will be found valuable. Though some portraits of this class were painted on canvas, the majority are on panels of wood. The encaustic process was used, by which the colors were applied in a wax medium and heated in. Most of the portraits belong to the second century A. D. A few are earlier or later. The second from the right on Screen B, with its closely cropped hair, may well be of the third century (Fig. 59, left). It exhibits especially well the tooling — not only brush strokes, but indications of the use of some kind of blunt point. Still another class of painted portraits shows the full figure. These are found on the outer linen wrappings of some mum mies. Examples may be seen on the east wall of this room between the frames of textiles. Floor Case S, already referred to, contains an un usually good example of a mummy with mask (Fig. 60), given by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan. It was found in the winter of 1910-11 at Meir in Middle Egypt. The mummy is extensively swathed and has under the heavy brown outer covering a high footboard. The hair of the 150 the NINTH ROOM mask is in the style of the Flavian Age (69-96 A. D.), but the changes of fashion in the Roman court may easily have been slow in reaching remote provincial towns. Thus it may be as late as the beginning of the second century A. D. Bands of hieroglyphs and ancient FIG. 62. CAPITAL FROM MONASTERY OF ST. JEREMIAS VI-VIII CENTURY A. D. Egyptian divinities in gilded cartonnage decorate the brown linen. The ancient label in Greek on the foot gives human interest, informing us that we have in this elaborate burial a young Greek woman, Artemidora, who died at the age of twenty-seven. She was the daughter of one Harpocradorus. In Wall Case F have been gathered lamps, terra cotta figurines, and vases of which the greater number were originally house objects. The first shelf (count ing from below) has examples of Nubian ware of the Roman period. The vase at the extreme left on the next shelf, with its decoration in slip, is a characteristic 151 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS Roman piece. The hydria at the right on the floor of the case is purely Greek in form. At the left on the same level is a "Bes vase," that is, a pot with the features of the grotesque little god Bes modeled on it. Full figures of this god may be seen in Floor Case Q at the north end of the room. Bes was one of the Egyptian gods whose cult was carried by soldiers throughout the Roman, world. Similar Bes vases, from local finds, may be seen, for instance, in the pro vincial museums of England and of the Rhine Valley. In Table Case E attention should be called especially to the fine examples of Ptolemaic and Roman gold jewelry. In this part of the room we may now begin a survey of the Coptic objects. It will be possible only to call attention to some of the most interesting ones. The visitor to the collection who has time and taste for details will find supplementary information on the labels. Many of the best sculptures are from the Monastery of St. Jeremias at Sakkara. This monastery was excavated on behalf of the Egyptian Govern ment in the seasons of 1906-09, and the Museum was fortunately able to purchase some of the duplicate material found. At the right of the door into the outer hall has been placed a copy of the only plan as yet issued. It does not include the rooms excavated in the last season of the work, but will be of some service until it can be replaced by the final plan. In the glass positives of Frame HI are contained distant views and details of the monastery. Dark masses of crude brick and a few column shafts mark the site, in close proximity to the great Step Pyramid 152 THE NINTH ROOM of the third dynasty. The principal church was basili- can in type, with apse at the east, wide nave, narrow side aisles returned across the western end, and narthex at the west. There was also a porch on the south com municating with the church. At least the nave, to judge by its width, must have been timber-roofed. In some of the views sculptures similar to the pieces FIG. 63. BASKET CAPITAL FROM BAWIT VI CENTURY A. D. exhibited here may be seen in situ or on the floor of the rooms in which they were found. The large capital (Fig. 62) high on the wall above the plan is from a late reconstruction of the church. Its seven-lobed leaves, if intended for vine-leaves, are unus ual in form. Below it is a basket capital of well known Byzantine type (Fig. 63), not from the monastery, though the type is found there, but from Bawit. On the wall at the left of Frame 1 1 1 is an inscribed block which has an interesting history. 1 1 was bought '53 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS from a dealer in Cairo who procured it from the modern village on the site of ancient Memphis. There it had been incorporated in the walls of a native house. The inscription makes evident that the block must, at some previous time, have been robbed from the Monastery of St. Jeremias, for in it the monastery's founders and patron saints, Apa Jeremias and Apa Enoch, are invoked. Across the room, in the south-east corner, the charm ing fragment of a sculptured screen should be noted. Above it and on the adjacent wall are some of the best friezes of the collection (Fig. 64). Here may be ob served one of the sculptured scenes so rare in Coptic art. Christ is enthroned in the center between angels and saints. At the right of the Christ are twelve baskets, obviously in reference to the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves. With the saints on this frieze may be compared the similar figures on the ivory throne of Maximian at Ravenna (photograph on Screen D). The two friezes below, one of them in scribed for a person named Orion, are excellent pieces of decoration (Fig. 64). The entire western wall above the table cases is given to capitals from the Monastery of St. Jeremias. Among them several deserve special notice. Two on the upper brackets, at the right of Frame HI, have a design consisting of a row of acanthus leaves, above which are palm leaves (Fig. 65). Below, near the window, is a frame containing photographs of similar capitals in Greece and Italy. This is one of the clearest instances of the continuance of a Greek design in Coptic art. The design may be traced to a time at least as 154 THE NINTH ROOM early as the date of the great altar of Zeus at Pergamon, in which a similar combination of leaves appears on the bolsters of Ionic capitals. It is doubtful whether out side of Egypt the palm was intended; some lanceolate reed leaf seems more likely. In the published examples Sm?#*»^®«^* 'if> * ¦ ^^¦^' « ¦-' t-t»-iai>.,^...^=TMa?aiy,.SSglimi-.- " "^HL FIG. 64. COPTIC SCULPTURED FRIEZES V-VII CENTURIES A. D. of pieces from Sakkara that retain their color the ribs of the palm leaves are indicated, but, curiously, a divi sion is made at the mid-rib and two half-leaves of one color alternate with two of a contrasting color, thus falsifying the sculptured design. Beyond the central window, above, at the right, may be seen the earliest type of capital found in the monastery. It is from one of the aisles of the main church, dating from the period before the building was reconstructed. As it is esti mated on historical evidence that the monastery was founded about 480 A. D., the capital may fall within '55 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS the fifth century. It is worked without the aid of the borer. Screen A, just here, has a series of photographs showingsomethingof the history of acanthus ornament, and the corresponding Screen D contains illustrations of the grape-vine in ornament, these being the two principal kinds of foliage represented by Coptic artists. Frames I and II of positives illustrate the work of the Museum Expedition on Early Christian sites in Egypt. In Frame II, at the central window, views of two of the stone monasteries in the Wadi Natrun are shown. Their highly interesting decorative details are mostly of the mediaeval period. These monasteries have been planned and photographed by the architect of the Expedition, working in cooperation with the Comite de Conservation des Monuments de I'Art arabe of the Egyptian Government — a committee which has charge of Coptic as well as Arab buildings. These records will be added to the department's archives. In Frame I are views of the large Christian cemetery, known as el-Bagawat, in the Kharga oasis. This cemetery contains, besides humbler graves, about two hundred tomb-chapels. These are of great architectural interest because of their early date, fifth century A. D., and good state of preservation. They are constructed of crude brick, and were once plastered white, within and without. A few interiors are dec orated in fresco. The majority of the tombs are square in plan, roofed with domes on pendentives, these being of one curvature. Others are rectangular with barrel vaults. The exterior ornament consists of engaged columns and arches. The capitals are 156 THE NINTH ROOM Corinthian in style, but in the cavetto cornices there is an interesting survival from ancient Egyptian architecture. Above the case of masks, on the north side of the room, are sculptured moldings from the Monastery of St. Jeremias (Fig. 58). The pattern, a simple guil- loche, with leaves on each side, is one of the most frequent in Coptic art and may be seen on many FIG. 65 CAPITAL FROM MONASTERY OF ST. JEREMIAS VI CENTURY A. D. pieces in this room. It is one of those instances in which a motive current throughout the Byzantine worid (compare the capitals of the lower arcades in Hagia Sophia at Constantinople) develops a special form in one country. Nearby, in the corner of the room, are representative Coptic grave stelae. There are apparently no records of the finding of such sculptured stelae in their original position. Some photographs on the left show graves in the Coptic cemetery of el-Bagawat (see above) whose superstructures were not wholly destroyed. '57 a HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS These have rude stones, inscribed with the name of the deceased, let into their structure. The photographs on the right are of modern Coptic graves having super structures, some with inscribed tablets. The sculp tured stelae exhibited here are only roughly treated FIG. 66. COPTIC GRAVE STELA VI-VII CENTURY A. D. at the back and doubtless were not originally free standing, but imbedded in a low structure over the grave. The stela, above, at the left, should be noticed. It has the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph meaning "life" instead of the cross — a common occurrence. Below in the middle, on the stela of Phoebammon 158 THE NINTH ROOM (Fig. 66) is sculptured an orans, a figure with hands raised in prayer. This is the attitude which the pious Egyptian of old assumed before his gods, and its pres ence in Early Christian art is almost certainly due to ancient Egyptian influence. FIG. 67. FRAGMENT OF A SCULPTURED DOORPOST COPTIC. VI CENTURY A. D. The department possesses an extensive collection of Coptic textiles, a selection of which is shown in four double cases extending from the east wall of the room. The dry climate of Egypt was especially favorable to the preservation of this interesting but perishable work. We now reach the doorway into the Tenth Room, and pause a moment to note the fragments of '59 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS sculptured doorposts from Sakkara on the right and the sculptured frieze above the frame of textiles on the left. The lower part of a doorpost has a design made up of bunches of grapes combined with acanthus-like leaves, finely decorative though illogical. The frieze (Fig. 64), on the other hand, has a design of vine stocks whose leaves and grapes are rendered with comparative truth to nature. In its lines, this is one of the most satis fying compositions in the whole collection. 160 THE TENTH EGYPTIAN ROOM FIG. 68. THE TENTH EGYPTIAN ROOM THE TENTH EGYPTIAN ROOM COFFINS OF THE TWENTY-SECOND TO THIRTIETH DYNASTIES (945-332 B.C.) AND OF THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD (332-3O B. C.) A CONSIDERABLE proportion of the extant Egyptian coffins date from the later dynasties and Ptolemaic period; the ones belonging to this museum are sufficient to fill a large room. The histori cal period covered here being the same as in the Eighth Room, the reader is referred for the history to the introductory paragraphs on pp. 125-128. Outer coffins are now either rectangular or anthro poid in shape. A common variety of the former, made of wood, has four posts at the corners and an arched lid. The form was supposed to be that of the coffin in which the god Osiris was buried. The de ceased person being regarded as a second Osiris, the effort was to make his burial as elaborate as that of the god had been. On the cover of these coffins a jackal and hawks symbolize the gods who guarded the body of Osiris. Inner coffins are all anthropoid, but the arms and hands are no longer represented (compare 163 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS the eariier examples in the Seventh Room). The cof fins now often have, as occasionally eariier, the special beard — long and braided, with tip curied up — given to divinities. This again is with reference to the iden tification of the dead with Osiris. In the smaller accessories of burial all the old customs were continued with anxious exactitude. Even more than this, great stress was laid on quantity. Every kind of amulet the Egyptians had ever conceived of would be placed in the wrappings of a single mummy; the ushabtis were more numerous than before, and all available space on the coffins was covered with magical formulae to protect the dead man in the next world. Small wooden tablets instead of stelae of stone are characteristic of the less expensive burials. In these the deceased ap pears in the presence of Osiris and other gods of the dead. There was also a revival, for those who could afford it, of the heavy stone sarcophagi which had been popular in the Old Kingdom. Great skill was exhibited in working the obdurate material, usually basalt or diorite, and the sarcophagi were often of im mense size. There is one in the outer hall of this museum which, without its heavy cover, weighs very nearly nine tons. But the decoration was no longer simple as in the Old Kingdom. Like the wooden coffins of the period, these imposing sarcophagi are closely covered with texts and scenes. In view of the occurrence on the coffins of long in scriptions, a word about their character is in place. The name and titles of the deceased and usually his pedigree are repeated many times on a single coffin, 164 THE TENTH ROOM but anything in the nature of a biographical text is rare. As hinted above, the inscriptions are concerned with the welfare of the deceased in the next world. There are three main bodies of texts of this kind, to-day commonly called the Pyramid Texts, the Book of the Dead, and the Book of What is in the Under- Worid. The Pyramid Texts are so called because they are found on the walls of the sarcophagus chambers of various fifth and sixth dynasty pyramids. A photo graph of one of chambers in Unas may be frame in the The Pyramid the most part than the time were first recor- they are the texts we pos- they are an in- for the study of f/fi£Ur;^.T.!::rrr£fcL^i4i-f' FIG. 69. FUNERARY STELA XXVI DYNASTY these inscribed the pyramid of seen in a wall Second Room. Texts are for much older in which they ded; in fact, oldest body of sess. As such, valuable source early religious There was a ideas and eariy forms of the language great revival of their use under the Saites. The other two religious books took form under the Empire. The term Book of the Dead was coined by Lepsius for the texts found on rolls of papyrus in burials of the Empire and later. Many of these occur on coffins of the Middle Kingdom and others bear in ternal evidence of being very old. These are incor porated with other material which had an origin as late as the eighteenth dynasty. It was not eariier than the twenty-sixth dynasty that the Book of the Dead '65 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS underwent its final redaction and the number and order of the chapters became fixed. In contrast to the Pyra mid Texts the prominence of magic is a marked char acteristic of the Book of the Dead. It is pathetic to note the number of pitfalls and possible calamities which the Egyptian thought awaited him in the next existence. He might, for instance, forget his own name, which would be fatal, causing his annihilation; he might suffer from thirst and see the water he wished to drink burn up before him; his heart, or some other member of his body, might be taken from him. For each of these evils the remedy was to recite a certain prescribed formula, and with these formulae the Book of the Dead provided him. Doubtless the priests encouraged the superstition of the people and aug mented writings of this kind for the gain there was in it. But despite all these curious and distorted views, there are clear traces in the Book of the Dead of the recogni tion of moral laws. These may have been felt less binding in that all of a man's sins could be blotted out by the use of the right magical formula, but it is some thing that expression was given to them. In the judg ment scene of the famous one hundred and twenty- fifth chapter the deceased is required to go through what is known as the "Negative Confession." In it, he declares that he is pure, never having committed a list of about forty sins. It is significant that among these stealing, falsehood, slander, adultery, and mur der are included. In the Book of What is in the Under- Worid, the passage of the sun-god in his bark through the twelve hours of the night is described. The hours are con- i66 THE TENTH ROOM ceived as caverns peopled with all sorts of strange and fearsome creatures. An acquaintance with the pictures and names of these would be a protection to the de ceased when he himself made the same journey. The two large Floor Cases A and B, at the left on entering from the Ninth Room, contain complete sets of coffins. The set in Floor Case B may be as early FIG. 70. THE TOMB OF HAR-KHEBIT BEFORE THE REMOVAL OF THE SARCOPHAGUS PHOTOGRAPHED BY J. E. QUIBELL as the twenty-second dynasty. It belonged to a priest at Thebes, Khelsher, whose father was named for the god Bes. His large black outer coffin is anthro poid in form and in it, of course, originally, were placed the other coffins and the mummy, the whole fitting together, a nest of boxes. Nearest to the mummy was a cartonnage, that is, a covering of many layers of linen and stucco pressed into the form of the body. The coffins in Floor Case A are a little later, of the twenty-sixth dynasty, when the four-posted form 167 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS made its appearance. This outfit belonged to a woman named Ta-Bek-en-Khonsu. She was buried in the tomb of her nephew, a priest of Mont at Thebes. Her sister-in-law, mother of the priest, was also an occupant of the tomb. Ta-Bek-en-Khonsu came from a long line of priests of Mont, her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all being enumerated in the inscriptions as priests of that god. The tomb was at Deir el-Bahri, accessible from the hypostyle hall of the small temple of Hathor, south of Hatshepsut's greater structure. When found, it was intact, even dried wreaths of flowers lying on the coffins. On the side of Case A nearest the window is Ta-Bek-en- Khonsu's wooden stela (Fig. 69). In it she appears, a shrinking figure, led by Thoth before Osiris, judge of the dead. Behind Osiris stands Isis. The woman carries in her hand her heart, upon whose testimony depends her fate of acquittal or condemnation. Below is the usual prayer for mortuary offerings, in this in stance addressed to the god Keb. Table Case P contains a network of beads and amulets from her mummy. In the Central Floor Case are Canopic jars lent by Mr. Theodore M. Davis. These are of aragonite and in their workmanship are among the most admira ble known. The human head and the jackal's head are especially beautiful. A statement with regard to the use of Canopic jars is made in connection with the earlier specimens in the Fourth Room. It remains here to say that from the nineteenth dynasty on it was customary to give the covers the form of the heads of the four Sons of Horus. These were minor divinities, THE TENTH ROOM important in the cult of the dead, under whose special care the jars were placed. Of them Hapi is represented with the head of a baboon, Kebehsenuf with the hawk's head, Duamutef with the jackal's, and only Amset is human-headed. A prominent object in the room is the basalt sarco phagus of Har-Khebit (Horus of Khemmis). It came from this nobleman's tomb at Sakkara and was dis covered, but not removed, by Mariette. In 1907, this museum acquired it by purchase from the Egyptian Government. Fig. 70, from a photograph by Mr. J. E. Quibell, shows the condition in which the tomb was left by ancient plunderers. The lid of the sarcophagus had been pushed aside, the mummy had disappeared, and the inner coffin had been ripped out to get posses sion of the gold leaf adorning it. This inner wooden coffin had fitted closely into the interior space, and frag ments of it still adhere to the walls of the sarcophagus. Wall Frames V and W contain views of the site, of the work of removing the lid, and of an amulet, statuette, and jars found in the tomb. The tomb itself was rock- hewn and undecorated, a large chamber accessible from the general level of the desert above by a vertical shaft. The sarcophagus was inclosed in a small inner chamber of harder stone, which the tomb robbers had first to break away. Har-Khebit lived in the period of the later dynasties, twenty-sixth to thirtieth, but there is nothing to fix his date more closely. He bore some ancient titles, "Unique Friend" and "Wearer of the Seal of the King of Lower Egypt," also two obscure priestly titles, but his importance and occupation are indicated by the title " Chief of the Cabinet-Chamber. " 169 A HANDBOOK OF THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS These, as well as the name of his father, Pe-di-Hor, and of his mother, Ta-Senet-en-Hor, are contained in the line of inscriptions on the lower part of the sar cophagus. The cover is inscribed with the seventy- second chapter of the Book of the Dead, figures of the Sons of Horus, Isis, and Nephthys, and the name and principal title of the deceased, often repeated. Of the other coffins in the room, that of a child with the mummy in Floor Case E and that of the priest Hor in Floor Case G are of special interest. Hor's cof fin is from Akhmin and there are others from the same site in this room. In general, coffins from smaller towns are of ruder workmanship than those from the old capital city, Thebes. Just outside the room against the pillars are two anthropoid coffins of limestone and in the outer hall is the magnificent large sarcophagus of Wen-Nofer of the thirtieth dynasty. Wall Case M, against the west wall of the Tenth Room, is filled, except for a few things on the upper shelf, with mummied animals and birds. From the earliest times in Egypt certain animals and birds had been associated with certain gods, much as the eagle is with Zeus or the owl with Athena. Probably, too, single animals were worshiped in temples as the visible presence of the god. But the conception that all serpents or all crocodiles were sacred, that it was a sin to kill one and a righteous thing to give them the'sort of burial that would be accorded a human being, belongs exclusively to the period after the fall of the Empire. The statements of Herodotus with regard to the ven eration of animals have been fully borne out by the dis coveries in Egypt — whole cemeteries of cats, caverns 170 THE TENTH ROOM filled with mummied crocodiles, numerous interments of smaller animals in bronze boxes (seep. 132), and mummies of ibis and hawk, such as are exhibited in this case. Wall Case S, on the opposite side of the room, contains sets of Canopic jars, wooden stelae, model coffins with mummy, a great number of tiny ushabtis in the original box, and other objects. In Wall Frames Q, T, L' and O are religious texts and vignettes in scribed in ink on mummy wrappings. Wall Frame R has fragments of cartonnage and Wall Frame N some larger amulets. Facsimi-les of the papyrus of Ani, an eighteenth dynasty copy of the Book of the Diead, of which the original is in the British Museum, occupy the two long Wall Frames K and U. At the windows are glass positives of some of the most inter esting coffins and mummies in the Egyptian Museum at Cairo. Many of them are of earlier date than the original material in this room. They are fully de scribed in the accompanying legends. 171 BIBLIOGRAPHY BIBLIOGRAPHY The following works on Egypt, among others, may be consulted in the Museum Library. History: Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization. " The Struggle of the Nations. " The Passing of the Empires. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums. Breasted, History of Egypt. Petrie, History of Egypt. Art and Archeology: Capart, Primitive Art in Egypt. Perrot and Chipiez, A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. Maspero, Life in Ancient Egypt and Assyria. Manual of Egyptian Archaeology. Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt. Petrie, Egyptian Decorative Art. The Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt. Budge, The Mummy. Newberry, Scarabs. Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians. Butler, Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt. Cairo Museum, Catalogue General des Antiquhes Egyptiennes (47 volumes). Volumes of the Archaeological Survey of Egypt (Egypt Ex ploration Fund). 175 a handbook of the egyptian rooms Religion: Erman, Egyptian Religion. Steindorff, The Religion of the Ancient Egyptians. Wiedemann, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians. Language: Erman, Aegyptische Grammatik. " Aegyptisches Glossar. Steindorff, Koptische Grammatik. Excavations: Publications of the Egypt Exploration Fund. " " Egyptian Research Account. " Hearst Egyptian Expedition. Publications on the excavations of the Deutsche Orient- Gesellschaft at Abusir. Publications on the excavations of Theodore M. Davis at Biban el Moluk. De Morgan, Fouilles a Dahchour. Quibell, Excavations at Saqqara. Cl^dat, Le Monastere et la Necropole de Baouit. 176 INDEX INDEX Abydos, 12, 16, 98, 108, no. Ahmes 1,81,82. Akhenaten, 87; head of, 95, 104, fig. 40. Amenemhat I, 44, 46. Amenhotep 1, 82; 111, 84; HI, palace of, 99, 100, 102, 104, figs. 42, 47- Amon, head of, 98, 1 1 5, fig. 43; priesthood of, 87, 88, 90, 92, 98. Amulets, 66, 87, 135, 136. Animals, veneration of, 1 70. Artemidora, mummy and mask of, 150, 151, figs. 60, 61. Aton, 87, 88, 94. BeVen-ranf, tomb of, 133, fig. 51. Book of the Dead, 87, 165, 166, 171. Book of What is in the Underworld, 87, 166, 167. Bronzes, small, 132. Canopic jars, 62, 63, 66, 168, 169, fig. 30; boxes for, 66, 74, figs. 28, 29. Capitals, composite papyrus, 128, 129, 130, 131 ; frontispiece, fig. 51; Coptic, 153-156, figs. 62, 63, 65; floral, 128; Roman Corin thian, 148. See also Columns. Cartonnage, 167. Coffins, of Middle Kingdom, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, figs. 17, 22, 26, 27, 32; of Empire,, 1 19, 120, fig. 50; of Saite to Roman Periods, 163, 164, 167, fig. 68. Collars, floral, 114, fig. 49. Columns, palm, 31, 32, 38, 142, fig. 13; proto-doric, 54, 74, 93, 94. Contracted burials, 7, 1 2. Coptic language, 144. •79 INDEX Copts, 144. Crabs, bronze, from New York obelisk, 148. Cretan influence, 94, 102. Demotic, 127, 137, 144. False doors, 29, 56, 65, 77, 133, figs. 9, 15, 51. Flints, Prehistoric, 3, 5, figs. 2, 3; Early Dynastic, 13, 16; XX Dyn., 100, lOI. Foundation deposits, 68, 115. Girdle, bead, 64, fig. 25. Glass, 96, 98, loi, 102, 112, 113, 143. Glazed Objects, Prehistoric, 5; Early Dynastic, 14, 16; of Middle Kingdom, 65, 66; of Empire, 93, 96, 98, 102, 105, 1 14, 115, 1 18, Saite, 132, 133. Har-Khebit, tomb and sarcophagus of, 169, 170, fig. 70. Hibis, temple of, 127, 129, 130, frontispiece, fig. 52. Hieratic, 127, 133. Horus, Sons of, 168, 169. Hyksos, 81, 82. Jewelry, of Middle Kingdom, 54, 64, fig. 24; of Empire, 93. Kharga Oasis, 127, 129, 130. Lion's head as part of a water spout, 75, 76. Lisht, 54, 55, 98. Manetho, 10. Masks of plaster, 143, 149. Mastabas, 22, 24-28, 52. See also Ra-em-ka, Sekhemhathor, tombs of. Menat, 102. Metal, use of, Prehistoric, 5; Early Dynastic, 13; under Empire, 96, 98, 104, 105. Models, terracotta, of houses, 40; wooden, of boats, granaries, donkeys, etc., 68, 69. Monasteries, of St. Jeremias at Sakkara, 152, 153; in the Wadi Natrun, 156. Mummification, 118, 119. Neolithic race, 4. Nubia, conquest of, 21, 46, 82; products of, 84. Obelisk, New York, 148. 180 INDEX Osiris, statues of king as, 60, 76. Paintings, portrait panels, 143, 149, 150, fig. 59; wall, 102, 104, 115, 1 16, fig. 42. Palaeolithic remains, 3, 4. Palermo stone, 1 1 . Pottery, Prehistoric, 5, 8, 14, fig. 4; Early Dynastic, 17; of Middle Kingdom, 63, 64, fig. 23; of Empire, 96, 100, 106, 113, 114, 1 16, 121; fig. 48; of Roman Period, 151, 152. Pyramids, 21-24, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60; figs. 8, 18. Pyramid texts, 165. Punt reliefs, 94, 121. Ra-em-ka, tomb of, 24, 28-31, figs. 8-12. Rameses II, 89, 90. Rings, finger, 102, 113. Sarcophagi, stone, 70, 74, 164, 169, 170, fig. 70. Scarabs, 1 10. Sculptors' models, 134, 135, figs. 53-55. Sculpture, earliest work, 13, 14, fig. 5; of Old Kingdom, 28-31, 36, 38, 39, figs. 10-12, 14-16; of Middle Kingdom, 53, 54, 70-78, figs. 31, 33-38; of Empire, 94-98, 104, 106, 108, no, in, 115, 120, 121, figs. 40, 41, 43-46; Saite, 126, 134, 136, figs. 55, 56; Ptolemaic, 128; Coptic, architectural, 146, 147, 152-157, 160, figs. 58, 62-65, 67; Coptic, grave stelae, 147, 158, 159, fig. 66. Seal cylinders, 16, 17, 66. Sebek-mes, tomb of, n i-i 12, fig. 46. Sekhemhathor, tomb of, 38, 39, figs. 15, 16. Senbtes, tomb of, 61-64, figs. 22-25. Sphinx, Thothmes HI as a, 115. Sinai, source of copper supply in, 21. Stelae, votive to Nut, 131, 132; of Osorkon I, 133; wooden, 164, 168, fig. 69; Coptic grave, see Sculpture, Coptic; see also False doors. Stone vases, 12, 13, 14, 17, 39, fig. 7. Syria, wars in, 46, 82, 83, 88, 120. Ta-Bek-en-Khonsu, coffins and stela of, 167, 168, fig. 69. Tables of offering, 39, 40, 56, 74, 131, fig. 21. Temples, pyramid, 22, 23, 24, 56, 58, 60, 70, fig. 20; of Empire, 94; see also Hibis, temple of. INDEX Thothmes III, 83. Tombs, Prehistoric, 6-8; Early Dynastic, 12; of Old and Middle Kingdoms, see Pyramids, Mastabas, Senbtes, tomb of; of Empire, see Sebek-mes, tomb of; Saite, see Bek-en-ranf, Har- Khebit, tombs of; Coptic, 156, 157, 158. Ushabtis, 1 16, 118, 136. 182 3 9002 00505 7329