Egyptian Art

This book is about the visual art produced in Egypt when the land was ruled by the god-kings, whom we have come to call the ‘pharaohs’ (albeit the word originally meant ‘the palace’). Consequently, it covers thousands of years from the first pharaohs, roughly about 3000 BC, until pharaonic authority dissolved in the national conversion to Christianity, between AD 300 and 350. Visual art, of course, may mean any crafted or decorated objects or surfaces we could sensibly understand as art, which in regard to ancient Egypt includes monumental painting, reliefs and sculpture, as well as smaller items of jewelry, furniture, decorated tiles, dishes and the like. Such artworks were fashioned in wood, ceramics, faience (glazed composite) or glass, and metals, including bronze and gold. Most of all, however, ancient Egyptians worked using stone of many kinds and qualities.

The finest art of ancient Egypt may fairly be described – even in our modern, sophisticated age – using words such as beauty, elegance and grace. To take an example, in 1967 a human-sized, calcite statue of the god Sobk-Ra was discovered by accident among the remains of his temple, near modern Gebelein in the deep south of Egypt [3, 4]. The statue shows the massive, crocodile-headed god embracing the relatively diminutive, yet solid and elegant, figure of the once mighty pharaoh, Amenhotep III (c. 1390–c. 1353 BC). Despite the god’s reptilian face, there is neither horror nor disgust in the composition, but serenity. The god has a human body, and is able to embrace the king like a proud father posing for a photograph. Although there is no sparing the outlandish details of his face, each individual tooth finely scored in the stone helps form the half-smile of the Mona Lisa. The king smiles likewise, and his arms have settled upon his kilt in a gesture of greeting (to us?). He is evidently not intimidated by his companion, and, we may note, his face is as handsome as the other’s is monstrous. Individual barbs in the god’s high-plumed crown, the folds of the king’s iconic headcloth (or nemes) and the ever-present coiled uraeus-cobra on his brow, even the lines of his make-up, have been worked distinctly into the soft-stone surface. The god’s solid knees and legs are shapely and muscular, and give the impression he may stand up at any moment, so fluid and precise is the modelling. The waxy stone has been carved into forms so plastic as to seem lifelike, and almost flawless after three and a half millennia.

What does a statue so beautifully carved tell us? Undoubtedly the relationship between the two characters – god and pharaoh – is crucial, intimate, and presented in human terms (family, serenity, touching, welcome). We see the crowned king, but beside him the god – more massive and enthroned – holds still greater authority. Both of them look towards the viewer, revealing no specific attitude nor emotion, though the confrontation is not hostile. As we look at the king, whose height the sculptor has arranged to meet our eye-line, the god’s gaze remains slightly above the engagement. What does this engagement have to do with the function of the statue? Who was its intended audience?

Looking more closely, we see how the god’s far hand is pressing the ancient hieroglyph

reading ‘life’ onto his companion – in fact raising it to his face. His crown carries the same coiled uraeus-cobra as the king’s, so whatever the uraeus represents (‘domination’, actually) applies to both of them. His throne takes a simple form, barely more than a cube with a step for the base and a back pillar rising to support the massive plumed crown, and it is covered at the sides with hieroglyphs that elaborate on the subject of the statue. In fact, where the statue is now on display, in the Luxor Museum of Ancient Egyptian Art, it is possible to walk round and see that the back too is formally plain but entirely covered with columns of clearly cut hieroglyphs. Through them, Sobk-Ra is made to speak to the king (not us) and state that he is, indeed, Amenhotep’s father and he does, indeed, love him. Specifically, he has made his son’s ‘perfection’, given him the festivals of kingship a million times over, and established him in the world according to the pattern of the Sun in the sky, so he may rise in splendour each day and endure until the end of time.

Accordingly there is so much in this image that seems recognizable, human and accessible, but there are also ideas and beliefs far from our own. Gather your thoughts for a moment, and the statue reverts to a crocodile-headed monster embracing a pint-sized ‘king like the Sun’. In other words, we may respond to the humanity, beauty and even authority of the art, but we will not truly understand it until we appreciate specific ancient values, such as the eminence of kings and gods, the functions of statues and the meaning of crowns, gestures or hieroglyphs.

The challenges we face in making sense of ancient Egyptian art are of various different kinds. There are obvious, practical matters, such as finding out how artists went about their business, what tools they used or who their patrons were. As noted above, there are also matters of use and context: where and when did ancient Egyptians resort to art, which audiences might have experienced it, what changes became apparent through the centuries? Not least, however, are questions of meaning: what are they trying to say in their art, and could we possibly learn from it?

Let us begin by establishing one basic use of art in pharaonic Egypt. Readers of this book no doubt identified the statue of Sobk-Ra as being ‘ancient Egyptian’ immediately because something about its style is distinctive and familiar. Similarly, a scene of the pharaoh Sety I (c. 1290–c. 1279 BC), who reigned two or three generations after Amenhotep III, is also quintessentially ‘ancient Egyptian’ [6]. The scene covers one wall of an entire temple that Sety I commissioned at Abydos in Middle Egypt. As we may expect, the figures are human in form, though once again there is an animal-headed oddity among them, and they are engaged in some esoteric performance presumably connected with the ancient life of the temple. The king, who is on the right, leans across a tall vase of flowers, evidently to present or offer something: on closer inspection, this is a bowl holding a woman wearing a feather in her hair

which in turn is a hieroglyph reading ‘truth’. A caption written beneath the bowl confirms that Sety is ‘giving Truth to the lord of Truth’. Before him a line of gods is seated in a kiosk topped off with more rearing uraeus-cobras. First among the gods – literally by position – is Osiris, king of the dead and lord of Abydos, seated on a throne, as befits his status in this, his home temple. He is holding a crook and a flail, while a goddess reaches out to him in the suggestion of an embrace. Appropriately, the hieroglyphs tell us she is his wife, Isis, and her right hand is raised in a gesture of greeting to the pharaoh. Behind Osiris and Isis, the falcon-headed deity is their son, Horus (so, however we explain his monstrous head, he is not simply the unnatural offspring of a human and a bird). Each character in the scene is distinctly visible, as though they are standing in a row, and each is distinguished by a crown or headdress, with horns and snakes among the more improbable millinery.

However mystifying aspects of the scene may be, the whole is attractive precisely because it is elegant, recognizably human and beautifully crafted. The limestone surface has been smoothed into delicate relief, until the contours of the king’s knees appear as though seen through linen so fine as to be transparent. Despite such delicacy, the physical mass of a stone wall in the grand setting of a temple brings immense authority to the characters and the ritual, and to the throne of Osiris. Yet, this area of the temple has no windows, so the true scale of the wall is hidden from view and the scene has to be revealed bit by bit by lamplight. Evidently this monumental work of surpassing craftsmanship was intended for the darkness, which at least adds to the sense that we are in the presence of mysteries. Every wall of each room of the temple is decorated in the same fashion, so there are more scenes here than any visitor could hope to scrutinize, even if electric lighting were provided.

Of course, we are discussing religious art. Having noted at the outset that most of the art that has come down to us from ancient Egypt is from sacred contexts, religious subjects are no surprise. However, we may now realize that ancient artists were addressing specific artistic problems. For example, how to illustrate gods? More specifically, how to illustrate the ways in which gods interact with the world? One artistic solution is that gods are given human bodies so they can embrace, greet, kiss or perform other meaningful human acts. They are also given the human faculty of speech, their words being inscribed on the artwork in hieroglyphs (a later, Greek word that means ‘sacred images’). That gods are not actually human is apparent from the occasional monstrous head, just as it is obvious from their authority over the king. That the king is like the gods in some sense is apparent from the intimate, familial relationships he has with them, and also the ways in which he may take on their regalia, and so on. Perhaps the question arises, how do the rest of us interact with the king and the gods? Presumably by making offerings as well, if we follow the model of the king; not least because, as the statues indicate, he exists among the gods.

Masterpiece
The Narmer Palette

9 Schist palette decorated on both faces with images of Narmer, the first king of Egypt. From the temple of Horus at Hieraconpolis. 0.65 m (2 ft 1½ in.) high. 1st Dynasty.

A slice of slate or black schist about 65 by 25 centimetres (25½ by 10 inches), inscribed on both sides, memorializes Narmer, the first historical king of Egypt, about 5,000 years ago. As such, the palette has become an icon of the sudden switch from the long silence of prehistory to the more recent chatter of the historical record. Although its original function is unknown, the palette was discovered at Hieraconpolis in a temple dedicated to Horus – son of Osiris and the god most associated with Egyptian kingship (see p. 34). Specifically, the palette was found in or near a dump of redundant, old items cleared out of the temple during new building work, apparently in the early 2nd millennium BC. In other words, the Narmer palette is just about the earliest example of a stone monument offered by a king to the temple of a god, and in many ways genuinely does establish the artistic template for the monuments of later kings.

Ostensibly it has the form of a mineral-grinding palette for making paint or cosmetics, though it seems too big and fancy to have been used as such. Moreover, large schist palettes were characteristically placed in burials during the last century or so before the first dynasty of kings, an era that we accordingly label ‘pre-dynastic’ rather than simply ‘prehistoric’ (see Chapter 8). Typically they were shaped as animals or boats, though this example is shaped more like a ceremonial knife-blade (see pp. 136–37, 140–41). Also, in the decoration there are animal images well known in pre-dynastic art, so the palette may be understood in the context of artistic themes developing in Egypt for decades or more before Narmer.

The decoration has been worked in shallow relief, and the modelling of the king – the details of his anatomy, regalia and make-up – are almost as detailed and accomplished, on a relatively small scale, as the reliefs in the temple of Sety I, though the palette is maybe 1,700 years older. The scenes on either side have been divided into separate registers using horizontal lines, which in turn serve as the ground or baseline for each register (the raging bull on the reverse, and the official standing behind the king on the face, even have their own ‘personal’ baselines). Registers will be employed as standard in two-dimensional art for the rest of the pharaonic era (see Chapter 6).

By the same token, it is striking that so many images on this palette remain standard in later representations of the pharaoh. These include his crowns, and also the bull’s tail trailing between his legs, which every subsequent king will be seen to wear; the same tail is worn by Sety I in Abydos and Ramesses II in Karnak above. The oldest, and in all eras the most important, festival of kingship was named the heb sed or ‘tail festival’, and this will crop up repeatedly in this book. Narmer’s name is written in hieroglyphs at the top of the palette on both sides, within a distinctive rectangular frame whose shape is that of the royal palace (see p. 34). His name is flanked by a pair of cows’ heads, which may well represent a goddess, either the obscure Bat or maybe Hathor, who in later times is regularly identified with the queens of Egypt (see pp. 58–59).

Dominating one face of the palette is a motif of Narmer twisting the hair of his enemies with his forward hand, while raising a stone mace to crush their heads. Much later, from about 1450 BC in the New Kingdom, this so-called ‘smiting scene’ had survived to become the typical monumental decoration on the pylon gateways to every Egyptian temple (see Chapter 11). Although Narmer strikes a dynamic pose, his feet are fixed firmly on the baseline, so in fact his movement is conveyed only by the implication of violent action plus the slight dip of his shoulders, which insinuates the line from his mace down to his victim’s skull. Beneath his feet are more victims, like the enemies under the feet of Ramesses II, marked as foreign by their nudity and long, trailing hair. Their broken bodies occupy a separate register, where they lie awkwardly crushed by the king’s weight. Behind the king, ‘the king’s servant’ carries his sandals, as though he ought not to soil them in enemy blood (though perhaps this vignette means to emphasize that he is wearing sandals). In front of him, the falcon with human arms must be the equivalent of the falcon-headed Horus in the scene at Abydos. Here, in Horus’ own temple, the ferocious bird adopts the disembowelling pose of a bird of prey but, in fact, is dragging a human-headed emblem or cryptogram by the nose, as though delivering more captives to the king.

On the reverse, the central pan or circular depression formed from the intertwined, distended necks of big cats must be a conceit, assuming the palette was never actually used for grinding minerals. Many commentators have noted a profound resemblance between this big-cat motif and contemporary images from Mesopotamia (an area of ancient Syria and Iraq), in which case it bears witness to the fact that Egyptian artists at this early date were already working in a wider world of ideas (see pp. 141, 142–43). In Egyptian terms, a brace of panther heads forms a hieroglyph writing ‘strength’, which is consistent with the violent imagery of the rest of the decoration. Be that as it may, the ferocious animals being either tamed or goaded form the centre around which have been assembled images of the pharaoh’s worldly authority and the physical demise of his enemies. At top, the crowned king walks in procession to survey the ranks of beheaded dead, followed once again by his sandal-servant and preceded by a priest with the standards of four districts or gods’ shrines. The dead are not laid across a field in perspective but arranged in rows, as though viewed from above, in order to make clear what we are looking at. The king stands tallest, his head at the top of the register, level with the standards. At the bottom of the palette the raging bull is trampling a man and destroying the walls of his city; from now on, the ‘strong bull’ is going to be a standard metaphor in art and literature for each and every king who wears the bull’s tail.