Above all other considerations the Egyptians were obsessed with the prolongation of life and with enabling the king to maintain the life and prosperity of Egypt. Much Old Kingdom statuary, for example, was astonishingly lifelike: no subsequent culture, nor even the Greeks at their best, achieved quite the perfect simulacra of living beings that the Egyptians brought off so completely in the early centuries of their history.
The Egyptians believed that life could be prolonged beyond death by a mixture of magical incantations, spoken or carved on the tomb’s walls, the provision of food and the appurtenances of living, either real or simulated, and by the careful preservation of the body and of the body’s appearance, the last being effected by the making of statues. The immense quantity of statues which survive from the Old Kingdom make it clear that they are, or are certainly intended to be, portraits of the subject represented. They may
(a)
(b)
Be idealized, to the extent that most subjects chose to have themselves represented as younger, rather than older. To this rule the great seated statue of Netjerykhet is a majestic exception and there were others who did not decline to have themselves represented as old, fat (a witness of prosperity) or even crippled.
Egyptian sculptors brought to the making of statues the same genius for observation which they deployed in their delighted recording of the ways of animals and of the countryside. There is no mistaking an Old Kingdom statue for one from a later period. Old Kingdom figures stand or sit foursquare; the planes of their faces tend to be broader than those of their successors, their eyes fixed on eternity. The sculptors of the Old Kingdom devised the ‘archaic smile’, later to be identified so firmly with Greek Kouroi, two thousand years before those statues were made, celebrating the sometimes ambiguous beauties of young Hellenes. But whereas the Greek smile frequently hovers on the edge of a simper, the Egyptian model is exalted, essentially anticipatory, as at the approach of a vision of glory.
The production of statuary was extensive and the workshops which produced them must have been large and busy institutions. Not all the statues made at this time are of the finest quality; some are distinctly provincial whilst others, though they have come from securely documented excavations, are sometimes bizarre or simply incompetent to the extent that were they to appear on the antiquities market in Cairo they would be dismissed as counterfeit. But these lapses from a vigorously controlled production quality are comparatively rare.
The finest Old Kingdom statuary was, so far as we know, produced with the simplest tools, though often the sculptors chose to work with the hardest and most intractable stones. Pounding, abrading, and cutting with copper bits and stone tools produced some of the greatest works of art ever made, fashioned with a quality of detail and finish which is so often miraculous.
Closely allied to the Old Kingdom genius in sculpture is that of carving in relief. The ability of such artists of this period is quite uncanny; on the one hand they could sustain a dense and complex sequence of images, of
Figure 9.1 The tomb of Nefer and his father Ka-Hay, who were with various of their relatives at Saqqara, provides an opportunity to observe the quality of life of a high official of the late Old Kingdom and also to reflect upon the good fortune which in Old Kingdom Egypt in particular often attended able men from outside the royal or noble lineages to rise high in the service of the king. Nefer’s tomb is a joyful compendium of the highly civilized pleasures of life at the court and in the countryside in the twenty-fifth century BC. It also contains one of the earliest and best preserved mummies, which demonstrates how the art of mummification declined in later periods.
Sources: (a) The Nefers’ pet baboon assists in the Wine Harvest. Photograph E. L.B. Terrace; (b) The Mummy of Waty. Photograph Author.
Scenes from daily life for example, over an extensive surface, without ever losing the coherence and vitality of the whole, whilst on the other they could produce an immediacy of impression which can really only be compared with drawing in stone, with the assurance of the placing of a line around the jaw or the suggestion of the fullness of a cheek which would hardly be approached by an Italian master.
To judge by later evidence reliefs on this scale were produced on a sort of production line procedure. The area to be covered would be marked out first of all with a grid of squares so that the design, of which a miniature version or a drawing would first be prepared, could be worked out on the grid, in an enlarged format. The master would direct the drawing. At successive stages craftsmen would incise, cut, polish, and colour the relief, all under the master’s supervision and that of his closest assistants. The technique would have been familiar to Leonardo or Michelangelo in their creation of a mural or a complex piece of statuary.
THE FIFTH DYNASTY - LIFE IN THE VALLEY
The scenes depicted on the walls of tombs throughout Egypt, but especially the later Old Kingdom period, particularly at Saqqara in the shadow of the royal monuments, are vibrant with life. This indeed is their purpose: they are part of the supreme third-millennium national industry of Egypt, the celebration of life and its prolongation into eternity.
No aspect of life is overlooked. Work in the fields, counting the cattle, entertainment in the family, pastimes of all sorts, the arts, building, cultivation of the vine, fishing, building boats, harvest time, all manner of work and involvement is represented. The trades are represented, as are some of the learned professions: the scribe, the doctor. Not much is shown, at this period, of ritual and the worship of the gods: this is still principally a matter for the King, the great priests, and their immediate entourages. Their practices might ensure the ever repeated rounds of birth and plenty but they seem distant from the preoccupations of ordinary men. The well-founded Egyptian was master of his own world and could conceive of no more perfect existence. All was for the best, indeed, in the best (or in a sense perhaps the only) of all possible worlds — always excepting, of course, the transfigured world of the gods, but even that was only Egypt existing in the celestial dimension.
The immense document which is represented by the tomb reliefs is often punctuated by captions, by the words of the participants in the activities which the reliefs depict. Egyptian was a language rich in metaphor and in cheerful insult: the language of the ordinary people recorded on the walls is earthy, uninhibited. It is also joyous: the fisherman, wading into the water, politely says ‘Good Morning’ to the different types of fish swimming at his feet.
World History
