EGYPTIAN ARCHITECTURE:LAND AND PEOPLE, THE MIDDLE EMPIRE

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CHAPTER II.

EGYPTIAN ARCHITECTURE.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED: Champollion, Monuments de l'Egypte et de la Nubie. Choisy,

L'art de bâtir chez les Egyptiens. Flinders-Petrie, History of Egypt; Ten Years Digging in

Egypt, 188191. Jomard, Description de l'Egypte, Antiquités. Lepsius, Denkmäler aus

Aegypten und Aethiopien. Mariette, Monuments of Upper Egypt. Maspero, Egyptian

Archæology. Perrot and Chipiez, History of Art in Ancient Egypt. Prisse d'Avennes,

Histoire de l'art égyptien. Reber, History of Ancient Art. Rossellini, Monumenti del

Egitto. Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of Ancient Egyptians.

LAND AND PEOPLE. As long ago as 5000 B.C., the Egyptians were a people already

highly civilized, and skilled in the arts of peace and war. The narrow valley of the

Nile, fertilized by the periodic overflow of the river, was flanked by rocky heights,

nearly vertical in many places, which afforded abundance of excellent building stone,

while they both isolated the Egyptians and protected them from foreign aggression.

At the Delta, however, the valley widened out, with the falling away of these heights,

into broad lowlands, from which there was access to the outer world.

The art history of Egypt may be divided into five periods as follows:

I. THE ANCIENT EMPIRE (cir. 4500?-3000 B.C.), comprising the first ten dynasties,

with Memphis as the capital.

II. THE FIRST THEBAN MONARCHY or MIDDLE EMPIRE (30002100 B.C.) comprising the

eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth dynasties reigning at Thebes.

The Hyksos invasion, or incursion of the Shepherd Kings, interrupted the current of

Egyptian art history for a period of unknown length, probably not less than four or

five centuries.

III. THE SECOND THEBAN MONARCHY (1700?-1000 B.C.), comprising the eighteenth to

twentieth dynasties inclusive, was the great period of Egyptian history; the age of

conquests and of vast edifices.

IV. THE DECADENCE or SAITIC PERIOD (1000324 B.C.), comprising the dynasties

twenty-one to thirty (Saitic, Bubastid, Ethiopic, etc.), reigning at Sais, Tanis, and

Bubastis, and the Persian conquest; a period almost barren of important monuments.

(Periods III. and IV. constitute together the period of the NEW EMPIRE, if we omit the

Persian dominion.)

V. THE REVIVAL (from 324 B.C. to cir. 330 A.D.) comprises the Ptolemaic or

Macedonian and Roman dominations.

THE ANCIENT EMPIRE: THE PYRAMIDS. The great works of this period are

almost exclusively sepulchral, and include the most ancient buildings of which we

have any remains. While there is little of strictly architectural art, the overwhelming

size and majesty of the Pyramids, and the audacity and skill shown in their

construction, entitle them to the first place in any sketch of this period. They number

over a hundred, scattered in six groups, from Abu-Roash in the north to Meidoum in

the south, and are of various shapes and sizes. They are all royal tombs and belong

to the first twelve dynasties; each contains a sepulchral chamber, and each at one

time possessed a small chapel adjacent to it, but this has, in almost every case,

perished.

Three pyramids surpass all the rest by their prodigious size; these are at Ghizeh and

belong to the fourth dynasty. They are known by the names of their builders; the

oldest and greatest being that of Cheops, or Khufu;1 the second, that of Chephren,

or Khafra; and the third, that of Mycerinus, or Menkhara. Other smaller ones stand

at the feet of these giants.

FIG. 1.--SECTION OF GREAT PYRAMID.

a, King's Chamber; b, Queen's Chamber; c, Chamber cut in Rock.

The base of the "Great Pyramid" measures 764 feet on a side; its height is 482 feet,

and its volume must have originally been nearly three and one-half million cubic

yards (Fig. 1). It is constructed of limestone upon a plateau of rock levelled to receive

it, and was finished externally, like its two neighbors, with a coating of polished

stone, supposed by some to have been disposed in bands of different colored

granites, but of which it was long ago despoiled. It contained three principal

chambers and an elaborate system of inclined passages, all executed in finely cut

granite and limestone. The sarcophagus was in the uppermost chamber, above which

the superincumbent weight was relieved by open spaces and a species of rudimentary

arch of Λ-shape (Fig. 2). The other two pyramids differ from that of Cheops in the

details of their arrangement and in size, not in the principle of their construction.

Chephren is 454 feet high, with a base 717 feet square. Mycerinus, which still

retains its casing of pink granite, is but 218 feet in height, with a base 253 feet on a

side.

FIG. 2.--SECTION OF KING'S CHAMBER.

Among the other pyramids there is considerable variety both of type and material. At

Sakkarah is one feet high, constructed in six unequal steps on a slightly oblong base

measuring nearly 400 × 357 feet. It was attributed by Mariette to Ouenephes, of

the first dynasty, though now more generally ascribed to Senefrou of the third. At

Abu-Seir and Meidoum are other stepped pyramids; at Dashour is one having a

broken slope, the lower part steeper than the upper. Several at Meroë with unusually

steep slopes belong to the Ethiopian dynasties of the Decadence. A number of

pyramids are built of brick.

FIG. 3.--PLAN OF SPHINX TEMPLE.

TOMBS. The Ancient Empire has also left us a great number of tombs of the type

known as Mastabas. These are oblong rectangular structures of stone or brick with

slightly inclined sides and flat ceilings. They uniformly face the east, and are

internally divided into three parts; the chamber or chapel, the serdab, and the well.

In the first of these, next the entrance, were placed the offerings made to the Ka or

"double," for whom also scenes of festivity or worship were carved and painted on

its walls to minister to his happiness in his incorporeal life. The serdabs, or secret

inner chambers, of which there were several in each mastaba, contained statues of

the defunct, by which the existence and identity of the Ka were preserved. Finally

came the well, leading to the mummy chamber, deep underground, which contained

the sarcophagus. The sarcophagi, both of this and later ages, are good examples of

the minor architecture of Egypt; many of them are panelled in imitation of wooden

construction and richly decorated with color, symbols, and hieroglyphs.

FIG. 4.--RUINS OF SPHINX TEMPLE.

OTHER MONUMENTS. Two other monuments of the Ancient Empire also claim

attention: the Sphinx and the adjacent so-called "Sphinx temple" at Ghizeh. The first

of these, a huge sculpture carved from the rock, represents Harmachis in the form of

a human-headed lion. It is ordinarily partly buried in the sand; is 70 feet long by 66

feet high, and forms one of the most striking monuments of Egyptian art. Close to it

lie the nearly buried ruins of the temple once supposed to be that of the Sphinx, but

now proved by Petrie to have been erected in connection with the second pyramid.

The plan and present aspect of this venerable edifice are shown in Figs. 3 and 4. The

hall was roofed with stone lintels carried on sixteen square monolithic piers of

alabaster. The whole was buried in a rectangular mass of masonry and revetted

internally with alabaster, but was wholly destitute internally as well as externally of

decoration or even of mouldings. With the exception of scanty remains of a few of

the pyramid-temples or chapels, and the temple discovered by Petrie in Meidoum, it

is the only survival from the temple architecture of that early age.

FIG. 5.--TOMB AT ABYDOS.

THE MIDDLE EMPIRE: TOMBS. The monuments of this period, as of the

preceding, are almost wholly sepulchral. We now encounter two types of tombs. One,

structural and pyramidal, is represented by many examples at Abydos, the most

venerated of all the burial grounds of Egypt (Fig. 5). All of these are built of brick,

and are of moderate size and little artistic interest. The second type is that of tombs

cut in the vertical cliffs of the west bank of the Nile Valley. The entrance to these

faces eastward as required by tradition; the remoter end of the excavation pointing

toward the land of the Sun of Night. But such tunnels only become works of

architecture when, in addition to the customary mural paintings, they receive a

decorative treatment in the design of their structural forms.

FIG. 6.--TOMB AT BENI-HASSAN.

Such a treatment appears in several tombs at Beni-Hassan, in which columns are

reserved in cutting away the rock, both in the chapel-chambers and in the vestibules

or porches which precede them. These columns are polygonal in some cases,

clustered in others. The former type, with eight, sixteen, or thirty-two sides (in these

last the arrises or edges are emphasized by a slight concavity in each face, like

embryonic fluting), have a square abacus, suggesting the Greek Doric order, and

giving rise to the name proto-Doric (Fig. 6). Columns of this type are also found at

Karnak, Kalabshé, Amada, and Abydos. A reminiscence of primitive wood

construction is seen in the dentils over the plain architrave of the entrance, which in

other respects recalls the triple entrances to certain mastabas of the Old Empire.

These dentils are imitations of the ends of rafters, and to some archæologists suggest

a wooden origin for the whole system of columnar design. But these rock-cut shafts

and heavy architraves in no respect resemble wooden prototypes, but point rather to

an imitation cut in the rock of a well-developed, pre-existing system of stone

construction, some of whose details, however, were undoubtedly derived from early

methods of building in wood. The vault was below the chapel and reached by a

separate entrance. The serdab was replaced by a niche in which was the figure of the

defunct carved from the native rock. Some of the tombs employed in the chapel-

chamber columns of quatrefoil section with capitals like clustered buds (Fig. 7), and

this type became in the next period one of the most characteristic forms of Egyptian

architecture.

TEMPLES. Of the temples of this period only two have left any remains of

importance. Both belong to the twelfth dynasty (cir. 2200 B.C.). Of one of these

many badly shattered fragments have been found in the ruins of Bubastis; these

show the clustered type of lotus-bud column mentioned above. The other, of which a

few columns have been identified among the ruins of the Great Temple at Karnak,

constituted the oldest part of that vast agglomeration of religious edifices, and

employed columns of the so-called proto-Doric type. From these remains it appears

that structural stone columns as well as those cut in the rock were used at this early

period (2200 B.C.). Indeed, it is probable that the whole architectural system of the

New Empire was based on models developed in the age we are considering; that the

use of multiplied columns of various types and the building of temples of complex

plan adorned with colossal statues, obelisks, and painted reliefs, were perfectly

understood and practised in this period. But the works it produced have perished,

having been most probably demolished to make way for the more sumptuous edifices

of later times.

FIG. 7.--SECTION AND HALF-PLAN OF A TOMB AT BENI-HASSAN.

THE NEW EMPIRE. This was the grand age of Egyptian architecture and history. An

extraordinary series of mighty men ruled the empire during a long period following

the expulsion of the Hyksos usurpers. The names of Thothmes, Amenophis, Hatasu,

Seti, and Rameses made glorious the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. Foreign

conquests in Ethiopia, Syria, and Assyria enlarged the territory and increased the

splendor of the empire. The majority of the most impressive ruins of Egypt belong to

this period, and it was in these buildings that the characteristic elements of Egyptian

architecture were brought to perfection and carried out on the grandest scale.

TOMBS OF THE NEW EMPIRE. Some of these are structural, others excavated;

both types displaying considerable variety in arrangement and detail. The rock-cut

tombs of Bab-el-Molouk, among which are twenty-five royal sepulchres, are striking

both by the simplicity of their openings and the depth and complexity of their shafts,

tunnels, and chambers. From the pipe-like length of their tunnels they have since the

time of Herodotus been known by the name syrinx. Every precaution was taken to

lead astray and baffle the intending violator of their sanctity. They penetrated

hundreds of feet into the rock; their chambers, often formed with columns and vault-

like roofs, were resplendent with colored reliefs and ornament destined to solace and

sustain the shadowy Ka until the soul itself, the Ba, should arrive before the tribunal

of Osiris, the Sun of Night. Most impressively do these brilliant pictures,2 intended

to be forever shut away from human eyes, attest the sincerity of the Egyptian belief

and the conscientiousness of the art which it inspired.

FIG. 8.--PLAN OF THE RAMESSEUM.

a, Sanctuary; b, Hypostyle Hall; c, Second court; d, Entrance court; e, Pylons.

While the tomb of the private citizen was complete in itself, containing the Ka-statues

and often the chapel, as well as the mummy, the royal tomb demanded something

more elaborate in scale and arrangement. In some cases external structures of temple-

form took the place of the underground chapel and serdab. The royal effigy, many

times repeated in painting and sculpture throughout this temple-like edifice, and

flanking its gateways with colossal seated figures, made buried Ka-statues

unnecessary. Of these sepulchral temples three are of the first magnitude. They are

that of Queen Hatasu (XVIIIth dynasty) at Deir-el-Bahari; that of Rameses II. (XIXth

dynasty), the Ramesseum, near by to the southwest; and that of Rameses III. (XXth

dynasty) at Medinet Abou still further to the southwest. Like the tombs, these were

all on the west side of the Nile; so also was the sepulchral temple of Amenophis III.

(XVIIIth dynasty), the Amenopheum, of which hardly a trace remains except the two

seated colossi which, rising from the Theban plain, have astonished travellers from

the times of Pausanias and Strabo down to our own. These mutilated figures, one of

which has been known ever since classic times as the "vocal Memnon," are 56 feet

high, and once flanked the entrance to the forecourt of the temple of Amenophis. The

plan of the Ramesseum, with its sanctuary, hypostyle hall, and forecourts, its pylons

and obelisks, is shown in Figure 8, and may be compared with those of other temples

given on pp. 17 and 18. That of Medinet Abou resembles it closely. The Ramesseum

occupies a rectangle of 590 × 182 feet; the temple of Medinet Abou measures 500

× 160 feet, not counting the extreme width of the entrance pylons. The temple of

Hatasu at Deir-el-Bahari is partly excavated and partly structural, a model which is

also followed on a smaller scale in several lesser tombs. Such an edifice is called a

hemispeos.

1. The Egyptian names known to antiquity are given here first in the more familiar

classic form, and then in the Egyptian form.

2. See Van Dyke's History of Painting, Figure 1.

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