EGYPTIAN SCULPTURE.
The tomb and the temple furnished the Egyptian sculptor the chief field of his art. The tomb was not a grave merely to contain the dust of the departed: it was his happy and eternal home. This gave the sculptor an opportunity to portray upon the walls of the tomb all the scenes in which the departed one delighted to move. In the tombs at Sakkarali and in the grottos of Beni-Hassan we find most interesting illustrations of the life and occupations of the ancient Egyptians. We see men hunting hippopotami, others ploughing, reaping, driving donkeys, building houses, or making statues; or women engaged in the varied duties of domestic economy; or boys wrestling or playing ball; or birds, beasts, or fishes in great variety and most clearly indicated. Besides these wall scenes, it also fell to the lot of the sculptor to make portrait-statues of the deceased. One or more of these statues were deposited in the tomb, and, being more durable than the mummified body, were supposed to increase the chances of immortality for the person so represented. The temple, also, the home of the divinity upon earth, offered in its walls, in the capitals of its columns, and in the decoration of its portals a similar field for the sculptor's art.
Ii the tombs of the Ancient Empire (Dyn. I.–X.) and of the Middle Empire (Dyn. XI.–XVII.) the wall-sculptures reflect mainly the domestic life of the people; during the New Empire (Dyn. XVIII.–XXXII.) they record more frequently the exploits and triumphs of the kings, whose rule had now far surpassed its former boundaries. In the later work we find, also, more frequent representations of the different divinities of the Egyptian pantheon.
The Technical Character of these wall-sculptures also undergoes a change. In the tombs of the Ancient Empire the figured forms project slightly beyond the wall as a true form of bas-relief. This was a natural method of working with calcareous stone, and practical enough when the sculptures, from their situation, were preserved from injury. In dealing
with harder materials, such as granite or basalt, the Egyptians pursued a peculiar method resulting in what Wilkinson has called the " relieved intaglio," a species of sculpture which presents the appearance of relief sunken into its ground. This was a saving of labor and a protection to the sculptured forms.
This labor-saving process was carried still further to the detriment of sculpture in the wall-carvings of the New Empire, where the figured forms are little more than silhouettes with carved outlines. With the exception of those upon the outer walls of the temples, the sculptures were covered with a thin laver of stucco and then painted. They thus appear to rep resent a stage of art in which painting and sculpture have not been wholly separated from each other.
in Ike the earliest times, however, the Egyp tians were acquainted with sculpture in the round. The excavations of recent years have brought to light many statues of the Ancient Empire revealing an unlooked-for variety of subject and freedom of expression. In the limestone statuettes at the Museum of Boulak the figures are por trayed not only standing, but leaning over or upon their knees or seated and engaged in various domestic pursuits.
Moro,- of among the wooden statues is the standing figure called the Sheik-d-Bded, or Mayor of the Village (p1.
It is a lifelike portrait of a village chief standing, with a staff in his left hand and clad only with a cloth extending from the loins to the knees. The statue was originally covered with a thin layer of stucco, and painted, the flesh red and the garment white. Add to this the pecu liar treatment of the eye, in which the metal pupil is set in a rock-crystal iris, and this again in a white, opaque quartz eyeball surrounded by eye lids of bronze, and we have a striking and realistic figure hardly to be classed with the rigid types of later days. The bronzes of this period are not though generally diminutive in size.