Egyptian Art

Ancient Egyptian art belongs to sacred, contemplative contexts, especially to the temples and tombs that in turn become places of offering. Although the art itself often was destined for darkness or for spaces visited only by specific officiants, the act of making art (as well as the architecture it graced) organized, exemplified, instantiated and celebrated human relationships: relationships with one another, with authority, with divinity, with the fact of Creation, and with the meaning of things. As such, pharaonic art rarely belongs to the particular or to the moment, still less to the artist, but seeks to illustrate and invoke what is perpetual and eternal, not as ideals but as the key to making sense of lives and events – the archetype by which to comprehend the individual, and the individual by which to recognize Truth.

Of course, when discussing a culture as ancient as Egypt a fascinating challenge is to appreciate how fundamental, familiar and challenging ideas first emerge. Chapter 1 discussed how early dynastic art, notably the palette of king Narmer, already embodies templates for many images that typically appear later. On the other hand, there are also the little differences and discrepancies that occur when people first try to get things just right. Hence, Chapter 3 looked at how the shape of the tumulus in the royal tomb changed and developed as new thoughts and new inspirations were directed towards the nation’s most sacred act, the king’s burial, and equally as new knowledge was gained about practical matters such as building on a monumental scale.

Nonetheless, even in the broad historical sweep of pharaonic art, there is a ghostly prescience about the ivory figurine showing one of the earliest kings just as we may expect to see him at any period [79]. The figurine was discovered in an ancient cache of early dynastic material, and though recognizably pharaonic is also worn in interesting ways by the resourceful passage of time. Still, the veneer of antiquity must not be mistaken for the primitive or naïve because this piece was once finely detailed, brightly coloured and carved with aplomb. In its original condition it would not look out of place in a collection of royal images from Egypt in 250 BC or 1400 BC, let alone nearly 3000 BC, which is what its archaeological context requires. Woven stripes are marked in a heavy cloak draped round the king’s shoulders, evidently the cloak worn by the king during the tail festival (see p. 41). His arms are suggested beneath the cloak, until the hands emerge to grasp one another and its hem trails out of his grip. Though the king’s ears seem oddly distended at first glance, the weight of the tall White Crown upon them soon becomes apparent, though their intrusive, bovine appearance also recalls the disproportionately large ears usually associated with statues of Middle Kingdom pharaohs (see p. 97). His face – sullen or determined, according to taste – is consistent with the slight but conspicuous stoop of his shoulders, which may evoke responsibility or the wisdom of a grand age. This stoop – the slightest shift from the expected upright – and the tiny size of the piece indicate that it was not intended to receive offerings, though it might have been an element within an offering itself, after the manner of various other human-shaped ivories and ceramics deposited in temples and tombs of late pre-dynastic and early dynastic date.

At such an early date ambiguity may also arise in purely historical terms: do we attach a special significance to the first occurrence of a particular image or scene? However repetitive a scene may seem to become in later ages, do we treat its first occurrence as a singular event – not licensed by simple convention and therefore authentically ‘historical’? For example, a handsome ivory label from the tomb of king Den is another example of the ‘smiting scene’, the classic image of the king literally imposing his authority on the earth by crushing his enemies’ heads [82]. Hence the enemy is on his knees, and his land is a formless desert that constitutes a baseline only where Den treads. The king is not only wearing a bull’s tail, he is specifically identified as ‘the bull’ (see p. 101). In fact, the principal text across the label apparently says ‘the first instance of striking the east by the bull’. Therefore the question may arise, is this scene commemorating the first such attack in Egyptian history or is it simply the first instance during Den’s reign? Each reader’s answer is likely to betray their preconceived expectations of what art is, and how history should be.

There is much else among the monuments of early kings we may recognize from later days, and may surmise would have had the same significance originally as we can establish with more certainty later. For example, two fragmentary lions found near the temple of Min at Coptos [83], possibly the oldest monumental sculptures that have come down to us, seem to recall elements of temples dating to two and three thousand years later, where sphinxes (of falcons, rams and other animals, as well as lions) often flanked entrances, and sometimes whole avenues of sphinxes lined processional approaches (see pp. 238–39). Although we do not know how the lions were originally employed at Coptos, a comparison with later practice seems straightforward. Likewise, the lions also evoke later poetry and hymns literally lionizing the king (see pp. 236–37). At first, the Coptos lions seem benign, grinning almost comically, their tails flicked onto their flanks. They may even be wearing muzzles, as do the oddly entwined ‘big cats’ on Narmer’s palette. Nonetheless, the snarling lips, bared fangs and pendant tongues, presumably directed at anyone approaching a particular entrance, evoke imminent violence in a manner analogous to the predatory serenity of the royal falcon (see pp. 34–35).

On the other hand, the violence of the royal lion is actually unleashed on the Battlefield Palette, which is one of a group of schist palettes (including Narmer’s palette) decorated with violent images and dating to the moment of transition to the first kings. Typically, the obverse face of the palette has a central hoop [84], as though it were a space for mineral grinding. This face also shows corpses as carrion pitilessly scattered about a battlefield, amid scavenging vultures and crows. The carnage is being wrought by the lion, seen savaging a broken carcass. In front of him a naked, bound prisoner walks before a cloaked official, while above him two more naked prisoners are tied to standards, recalling the standards parading past the decapitated ranks on Narmer’s palette. The prisoners are as trapped and helpless as the birds in Nebamun’s hands (see p. 125).

The reverse is a more cryptic composition and the total loss of the top of the palette hampers our understanding [85]. A pair of giraffes or antelopes (gerenuks?) graze on a date palm, while a fancy bird (a guineafowl?) looks on. Neither kind of animal is prominent in later art, so how should we interpret the scene? Is it, at face value, a bucolic alternative to war, a far-off exotic land like Punt (see p. 207) or, more topically, the view of a conquered land? Are there themes here about kingship that we fail to recognize because, unlike the bull and lion, these animals did not survive into later imagery? If we apply the ‘hieroglyphic’ interpretation and ‘read’ the scene (see pp. 98–101), we must take our readings from hieroglyphs otherwise known only centuries later to suggest a text about ‘foreseeing sweetness’, which would certainly be a telling counterpoint to the battlefield but nevertheless seems like interpretation as special pleading. No doubt, without later variations on a scene or its main elements to guide our comprehension, any interpretation of its meaning this early in Egyptian history is speculative at best.

Moreover, images of boats with high prows and decorated cabins, accompanied by tall, elegant figures with crowns and sceptres, appear away from cemeteries in rock-drawings conventionally dated to the late 4th and early 3rd millennium BC [88, 89]. These drawings are not uncommon on promontories and steep rock-faces throughout the principal wadis (seasonally dry river valleys), which cut through the deserts to create highways into the Nile Valley. Some boats have dozens of rowers, while others are pulled by ropes. In their own context, we may think the meaning of these boats uncertain, but once again the art of later times simply suggests they are festival boats of gods in procession before priests and other worshippers (see pp. 194–201). If so, the decorated ‘cabins’ would actually be the shrines from temples and occasionally, in fact, other evocative images, such as a bull or a crescent, sit on board in place of a ‘cabin’. Figures with regalia may be gods or priests or perhaps the nascent images of proto-kings, while more slender figures with upraised arms may be their female equivalents. We may imagine an ancient vision akin to ‘the barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, / burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold / purple the sails’ (Antony and Cleopatra II, Act 2: 2). If so, art in ‘Naqada culture’ was religious in character, tied to festivals, and this flowering in late pre-dynastic times had the same basic inspiration as monumental art in the pharaonic era.

On the other hand, could we not postulate that ‘Naqada culture’ boats meant something completely different in their own time? For example, perhaps the spread of ‘Naqada culture’ in cemeteries is evidence of the immigration of a ‘boat-people’ into Egypt – the record of a singular prehistoric event. To play Devil’s advocate, a magnificently carved pre-dynastic knife handle among the treasures of the Louvre is said to have come from Gebel el-Arak, in the general vicinity of Naqada [90, 91]. In the exquisite decoration, among familiar images of violence, animals and so on, the dramatic intrusion of a so-called ‘lion-strangler’ – an artistic motif well known in contemporary Mesopotamia – may be interpreted as the mark of foreigners in Egypt around the time of the first pharaohs. In other words, could this be evidence not just of the influence of foreign crafts and foreign ideas but of foreign invaders? In which case, perhaps even the origin of pharaonic art is to be found outside Egypt. Of course, here is the nub: questions of origins are a notorious problem in prehistory, generally because there is little unequivocal, objective information. Modern scholarship tends to maintain that people arrived in Egypt to take up farming when the Nile floodplains became significantly drier, probably some time between 6,500 and 9,000 years ago. Without overstating the evidence, presumably people had been living on higher ground round the fringes of the Nile for such a long time before farming was adopted – perhaps even tens of thousands of years – that the only meaningful explanation of where Egyptians originally came from may well be … elsewhere in Egypt. In other words, there is no compelling reason to suppose that the people who populated or eventually ruled the Nile floodplains came from one place, at one time, nor indeed for one reason. On the other hand, many scholars in the 20th century – when speculation on the formative role of race, immigration and miscegenation in human origins was rife – did reach that very conclusion, which serves to demonstrate how tentative any conclusions about prehistory must be. In the 21st century, how we discuss the first inklings of pharaonic art in prehistory, and its connections with art elsewhere in the world, is essentially still going to be determined not by the nature of the evidence but by our own expectations of early human activity, and that discussion lies beyond the scope of this book.

Masterpiece
‘Tomb 100’, or the ‘Painted Tomb’, Hieraconpolis

92 Copy of the wall decoration, now lost, from ‘Tomb 100’ (the ‘Painted Tomb’), Hieraconpolis. Plastered and painted limestone. 1st Dynasty or earlier.

At Hieraconpolis, an entire city dating back to the late pre-dynastic and early pharaonic era has been the subject of archaeological excavations since the 1890s. At the heart of the early city was the huge mud-brick enclosure of a temple, later certainly the temple of Horus (see p. 23). In contemporary cemeteries nearby the emergence of elite burials, distinguished by their size and their wealth of grave goods, is quite clear, though what explains their pre-eminence is less obvious. Among them ‘Tomb 100’ or the ‘Painted Tomb’, discovered by F. W. Green in 1899, is perhaps the oldest known example of an Egyptian tomb whose rock-cut burial chamber was lined with brick, then plastered and painted. Both the form and content of the wall-paintings bear close comparison to what we may expect during the pharaonic period, aside from the fact that there is no writing of any kind.

The paintings include familiar images rendered crudely with ‘stick men’: a veritable flotilla of boats with fancy cabins, processions of wild animals and hunting dogs, and several ‘smiting scenes’. Even the enigmatic ‘lion-strangler’ puts in an appearance. At top, a plumed priestess (?) seems to be wailing over the unfolding violence. (Unless she is singing its praises?) Flotillas, men fighting, hunting with dogs – these are all motifs known in later tombs. Do they suggest a military subject, perhaps – celebrate a proto-king or an elite warrior? How else would we explain such a confluence of riverine activity and violence? Actually, a scene of several boats carrying the images of gods while surrounded by fighting corresponds exactly to the fullest descriptions of the festivals of Osiris at Abydos, though the written accounts were not set down until centuries later. Thus, ‘I beat the rebels away from the sacred-boat, and overthrew the enemies of Osiris,’ claims Ikhernofret, an organizer of the festivals in the reign of Senwosret III (c. 1840–c. 1805 BC). What may seem a blatant statement of military might in an anonymous prehistoric context, in an Egyptian funerary context may well turn out to be a representation of one of the primeval festivals of kingship.

93 Reconstruction of the early dynastic enclosure at Hieraconpolis, which certainly later was a principal temple of Horus. The rectangular enclosure with central mound or artificial tumulus may be the model for (or a parallel of) the earliest royal tombs, mortuary temples and pyramid complexes at Abydos, Saqqara and elsewhere.

‘Tomb 100’ originally had a simple superstructure, using timber and reeds to create a rectangular wall round a tent or canopy (a ‘proto-mastaba’?) covering the actual interment. Quite possibly the superstructure emulated the form of the temple of Horus [93], and accordingly may be understood as an ancestor of the kings’ tombs at Abydos and Saqqara. On the other hand, we must avoid the temptation to assume that crude pictorial forms and smaller size in relation to other tombs indicate greater antiquity, or that a tomb without writing has to be prehistoric. In other words, ‘Tomb 100’ may not be older than the much larger and more sophisticated tombs of the kings at Abydos. Perhaps ‘Tomb 100’ belonged to a distinguished contemporary of the first kings, a member of the royal family or even a priest of Horus?

Masterpiece
Steatite disc of the palace official Hmaka

94 Decorated disc from the tomb of Hmaka. Saqqara. Steatite. 10 cm (4 in.) diameter. 1st Dynasty.

Hmaka was buried at Saqqara, the cemetery of Memphis. According to an ancient tradition, apparently confirmed by archaeology, Memphis was founded as Egypt’s administrative capital at the beginning of the pharaonic period. Consequently, Saqqara came to prominence many decades before the Step Pyramid was built here (see p. 50). The earliest Saqqara tombs were constructed with a mastaba over a rock-cut burial chamber. Usually the mastabas had internal chambers, accessible only during construction, to allow for large quantities of offerings. Some at least had an enclosure wall and an offering chapel, while the largest were accompanied by boat burials.

Hmaka’s tomb was among the most impressive, a mastaba nearly 60 metres (200 feet) in length. A huge collection found there included the oldest known papyrus writing scrolls, as well as this steatite disc, which is the best preserved of several. They might have been used as gaming pieces. The steatite bed has been carved in relief, with a cable pattern round the edge, to create a naturalistic scene of two dogs hunting gazelles. The black dog is mostly sculpted in the bed, but the highlight on his chest and the whole of his canine partner are inlaid calcite. Their quarry is also inlaid calcite apart from the horns and hooves, which are sculpted from the bed. The dynamic, sinewy dogs are shown in three dimensions, with a hint of perspective as the head of the pale dog closes in on his prey. In accordance with the standard principles of Egyptian art, the animals are arranged to fill the available space and do not hinder the view of one other. Indeed, the figures only touch at one point where, savagely and dramatically, the black dog crushes his victim’s throat, courtesy of some precise cutting and inlay.

One great scholar of Egyptian art, Cyril Aldred, noted that the disc was ‘an early example of the Egyptian predilection for squaring the circle and thus giving expression to the essential Egyptian feeling for space as rectilinear’. However, this does not mean the ancients could only understand the world in rectilinear terms or were insufficiently skilled to work otherwise. The mere fact of the disc itself is sufficient to demonstrate this and, while each animal is located upon a baseline as we would expect, the baseline is a circle and the dogs’ bodies are appropriately curved. Rather, the point is that the ancient artists were able to deduce the meaning of the scene in a structured manner, and devise the most effective layout on that basis. The success of this scene in decorating the whole face of a disc is testament to how effective they were in their analysis, not how limited.