The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (29 page)

It had taken millennia to discover that hieroglyphs were the phonetic symbols of a dead spoken language. But statuary hieroglyphs, the sculptures and reliefs, were direct and visual. And they proved to be the true “picture writing” of the ancient “figure-writers.” A statue of Zoser or Rameses II needed no Rosetta stone!

The “hieroglyphic” style, which gave Egyptian art its character and its durability, was never better described than by the pioneer French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero (1846–1916), who became director general of excavations and antiquities for the Egyptian government, discovered the first great cache of mummies, excavated Saqqarah, and valiantly worked to prevent the looting of Egypt’s antiquities. He was awed by the simplicity of the ancient Egyptians’ technique:

Yet, as it turned out, some of their most unforgettable creations were human figures.

The arts of Egypt, where the Greeks believed that all civilization had begun, seemed especially significant. Herodotus (fifth century
B.C.
) credited the Egyptians with discovering the solar year and making the calendar. They “first brought into use the names of the twelve gods, which the Greeks adopted from them; and first erected altars, images, and temples to the gods; and also first engraved upon stone the figures of animals.” By about 3200
B.C.
, when King Narmer, classically recorded on a famous slate palette, unified the “two Egypts” into one ruled by a divine king, the shape of Egyptian art for the next millennia was already revealed. The spoken words of ancient Egyptians were gone with the wind, but their visual images survived with the impassive features of their eternal god and the repetitive contours of their daily lives. This was possible because their visual arts did not try to say too much. Their conventional style, conforming to its own rigid canon, became an institution to be preserved with their religion.

We think of the ancient Egyptians as pyramid builders from the unique mark they left on the desert landscape. We should think of them too as image makers, for no other people in Western culture has given so crucial a role to its images, and none has nourished so continuous and homogeneous a style. Egyptian sculpture, like the pyramids themselves, was collaborative. Quarrying the stone from a cliff face with a soft copper chisel aided by wetted wooden wedges expanded in the sun required the skill and patience of many people working together. Cutting the stone expertly where it was found could save laborious transportation, and reduce the sculptors’ work when it reached its destination. Then the sculptors’ task was only one in a series. Next came the cutters of hieroglyphs, followed by metalworkers to insert the eyes, and painters for coloring. Artist-craftsmen worked in teams.

Awed by the beauty of their work, we must try to remember that their creation in their eyes had an urgent practical use. Its main function was changelessness. Their conventional images were to form what the stone was to substance. Stone images would perpetuate the living form for the eternal life served by the pyramids.

The continuity of Egyptian life was punctuated by the struggle of vigorous pharaohs to unite Upper (Southern) and Lower (Northern, Delta) Egypt. And invaders carried innovations. By bringing the horse-drawn chariot and the composite bow, about 1680
B.C.
the Hyksos hastened the pace of life. The most famous of their ancient innovators was the fabled Akhenaton (1375–1358
B.C.
), who established a new cult of the sun-god and briefly refreshed the forms of art.

But since Egyptian geography made life seem repetitive, their artists’
divinely appointed task of creation was to reflect this in flawless enduring images. The king’s primary obligation, as Amenhotep III said, was “to make the country flourish as in primeval times by means of the designs of ‘Maat’ [the divine right order].” For them the movement of time, mirror of a divine archetype, was not a progress but a rhythm.

The Nile, the current of Egyptian life, dramatized that rhythm. Egypt, as Herodotus noted, was the gift of the Nile, lands made fertile by annual inundations. Egyptians were those who drank Nile water. The reliable Nile showed its own cycle of birth and death, and Egyptians gloried in the symmetry of their world. If there was a Nile below, there must also be a Nile above. Rain was their “Nile in the sky.” The Pharaoh was keeper of this eternal order. If regularity ruled the world, unique events were unreal or insignificant. And if the unique had no meaning, what meaning could there be in history? Since their past was never remote, theirs was a timeless world. Since the same event occurred again and again, their texts could describe the whole past as if it were recent.

In other societies, the king, being only the agent of the gods, could be more or less effective, generous or wrathful, but not in the Egyptian realm of god-kings. The Pharaoh’s face and gesture were not features for a character portrait but the impassive image of a regular universe. Living embodiment of the unchanging God, the Pharaoh could not conceivably be arbitrary or whimsical. The Egyptian chronicles did not announce that a new king now rules, but rather that another king has “ascended” the timeless throne. Their indifference to the unique frustrates the modern historian. When King Pepi II (Sixth Dynasty, c.2566–2476
B.C.
) commanded carved reliefs to record his unprecedented ninety-year reign, the sculptors depicting his victory over the Libyans listed names of the defeated chiefs beside their images. But these are the very same names listed in the victory reliefs of King Sahure two hundred years before! When Rameses III named his conquests in Asia, he simply copied the list of his predecessor, Rameses II, who in turn had copied the list of Tuthmosis III. So the repetition of the timeless went on.

It is not surprising, then, that the triumph of Egyptian art was the portrait statue in stone, a perfect embodiment of a static view of life. This meant, too, that Egyptian sculpture could not be the product of fancy, imagination, or originality. Nor should any work be identified with particular sculptors. Their enduring truth was the harmony between man and the eternal order, embodied in their king. The Egyptian word for “great house”—Pharaoh—by the Eighteenth Dynasty came to mean the king himself, the container of divinity. And since Egyptian sculpture was itself a religious institution, the continuity of their religion required a timeless sculptural style.

Their pyramids, “castles of eternity,” we have seen, were grand symbols of the ancient Egyptian obsession with eternal life. The mummy and its substitutes would provide a permanent body for the spirit of the deceased. Just as the pyramid builders were not mere engineers, Egyptian sculptors were not mere decorators. Their task was to ensure the prosperous afterlife of the tomb’s occupant. Their sculptures were backups for the mummy. If the mummy should decay or be damaged or stolen, the deceased man’s
Ka
, his vital force, would need this other habitation. A portrait statue inscribed with the deceased’s name and animated by an “opening of the mouth” ceremony could serve in place of the mummy. Housed in a sculptured likeness, the deceased man’s
Ka
would live on forever. Egyptians at the tomb felt close to their departed. When meals were offered at the tomb on feast days the deceased was assumed to be present.

We see efforts to be doubly sure that the
Ka
would not lack its body, in the numerous “reserve heads” found in some tombs. In case their mummified bodies were destroyed, limestone portraits of the family of King Cheops (Fourth Dynasty, c.2640
B.C.
) were put in the burial chamber. These appear to reproduce the plaster masks that were modeled over the linen mummy-wrappings.

The portrait statue in the tomb was no mere memorial, but was designed to be the person himself. Nor was it intended originally to be an object of visual delight for visitors. For in the early Dynastic tombs these portrait statues were hidden away in the
serdab
, a sealed statue chamber. Funerary statues were made “not to be admired but to be immured.” They expressed a feeling stronger than agoraphobia, a “claustrophilia,” revealed in the pyramid itself, in the swaddled corpse in a nest of coffins inside an ornate sarcophogus, and also in the curious “block” sculptures. In these figures, legs and arms were kept confined in a solid stone cube, with only the head, the side of the arms and the toes protruding. The shape itself expressed secure confinement and solidity.

Still, to serve its practical purpose the funerary statue had to be a clearly recognizable portrait of the deceased. Otherwise the vagrant
Ka
might not find its proper habitat. In the temple to a god-king, too, the portrait had to be recognizable. But it could not depict casual or commonplace activities. By contrast the grave stele of classical Greece might show the deceased at a meal or playing a game. The changeless majesty of the Pharaoh link between the human and the divine could not even hint at the abrasions, the irritations, or joys of this temporary life below.

In the Old Kingdom the deceased king became the god Osiris. Then gradually all deceased Egyptians could become Osiris too, and the tombs and funerary statues of private persons increased. The sculptor’s difficult assignment was to show the subject’s individuality without any time-bound
character or personality. The stable figure, hands at side, could not show movement, and Egyptian sculptors focused on the most immobile part of the body, the head.

By the time of the New Kingdom (1580–1350
B.C.
), the forms of Egyptian sculpture in the round did show some variety. Funerary statues were no longer secreted in the
serdab
. They were multiplied, were sometimes colossal parts of the architecture, or they might be small statues included in the coffin. Except for the period of Akhenaton’s celebrated monotheistic sally (1373–1357
B.C.
) the sculptural style was little changed. When Akhenaton moved his capital from Thebes to Amarna, a modernist “Amarna Interlude,” emphasizing the shared regency between the Pharaoh and the heavenly king Aten and liberating from old rituals, briefly left its mark in a few uniquely stylish figures. But this interlude soon ended. Egyptian religion dominated sculptural art, and ancient Egyptian sculpture never became secular.

The art of portraiture very early created its own rigid conventions. Craftsmanship became the enemy of imagination. The Egyptians’ “canon,” an archetype for the sculptured human figure, may be the most durable pattern in the history of art. In a number of unfinished tombs we find the marks of the “grid” that guided the sculptor at his work. It was long supposed that these were only a device commonly used by artists—the
mise aux carreaux
—for enlarging any small sketch. Then it was noticed that the squares always intersected bodies in the same places. These proved to be the units of the canon of Egyptian sculpture. A standing figure comprised eighteen rows of squares (not counting a nineteenth row for the hair above the forehead). The smallest unit, the width of the fist, measured the side of a square. From wrist to elbow was three squares, from sole of the foot to top of the knee was six squares, to the base of the buttock nine squares, to the elbow of the hanging arm twelve squares to the armpit fourteen and a half squares, to the shoulder sixteen squares. The seated figure from sole to top measured fourteen squares. This same scheme was also applied to painting and relief. These precise proportions were followed for some twenty-two hundred years, longer than the whole Christian era, from the Third Dynasty (2980–2900
B.C.
) to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (663–525
B.C.
). Even the Twenty-sixth Dynasty brought simply a revision in the measuring units.

The Egyptian artists never developed perspective. The mere appearance of an object to the eye, varying with the position and movement of the viewer, did not interest them. Of course, perspective requires that we depict the apparent diminution of the object as it approaches the vanishing point. And this may require foreshortening. But the ancient Egyptians focused on actual unchanging physical dimensions.

The Egyptian canon not only prescribed the location and proportion of every bodily detail, but the way of depicting the body. On a flat surface the head must be presented in profile, but the eyes frontally. Statues in the round were designed to be viewed only from the front. This unbending canon inhibited the artist’s imagination, but it also accounted for the high standard and unmistakable style of Egyptian sculpture over millennia. The canon was both the price and the prison of the sculptor’s high art.

The Pharaoh had to be depicted in a timeless posture. If standing, he had both feet firmly on the ground, arms down by his side. Or if seated, he was in the hieratic posture he took during his public appearance. The body of a ruler, the living god Horus, was always youthful. Though variations in style could indicate the reign when a statue was made, it only suggested the features of some particular Pharaoh. In the New Kingdom, to ensure a uniform image, the Pharaoh’s chief sculptor would make a master portrait. Copies taken from the work of the few artists allowed to view the Pharaoh in person would be reproduced by casting to serve the whole kingdom.

The rigidity of tradition and the power of archetypes were tested in Akhenaton’s Amarna Interlude. In the New Kingdom in that revolutionary phase of Akhenaton’s monotheism the visual arts briefly showed signs of a new naturalism. But Egyptian artists still did not formulate laws of perspective. The frontal view continued to dominate.