Egyptian craftsmen of the earliest periods produced works of a superlative beauty but they made objects with a truly wonderful technique and an applied and disciplined skill hardly ever equalled anywhere in the world in later centuries. Indeed the Egyptian craftsmen of these periods deserve to be recognized as amongst the supreme master craftsmen of all history. Not for nothing was the High Priest of Ptah, the paramount creative god of Memphis, called the Master of the Master Craftsmen.
In all of these activities, indeed in the entire round of their existence, the Egyptians had but one motivation: it was so evident and fundamental that it never required statement or articulation. They were obsessed in a positive and glorious sense, with life. Their genius was directed towards the celebration of life and its prolongation to eternity. The entire power of the state and those who lived in it, from the divine king to the humblest peasant, was focused on this single purpose, to sustain the life of Egypt. In this exalted enterprise art was required to fulfil a particular responsibility.
At no time was this wholesale identification between what might be called the corporate life of the Egyptian state and its harnessing to the objective of the prolongation of life so significant as during its beginnings. It was, indeed, as if the whole genius of the nascent state was directed towards resolving the dilemma of man’s transient existence. It is this objective and the extraordinary quality of the works of art and of architecture which were created to advance it that distinguish the first thousand years of Egyptian history and which mark that time out from the long sequence of centuries which succeeded it. What made this period so very exceptional was the purely innovative quality of early Egyptian achievement, as much in art as in state institutions, probably in ritual also, when virtually everything that is identified with what is customarily called ‘Pharaonic civilization’ throughout its history was invented. In its first flowering it was pristine and in all essentials untouched by conflicting or confusing external influences. Similar considerations applied to the evolution of the Egyptians’ beliefs and intellectual concepts as to the development of the forms of their material culture and of their architecture. The role of kingship, the nature of the gods, the relationship between the gods and their chosen people, the application of architectural forms, and the flowering of Egyptian art and craftsmanship are all to be seen in their purest form and most immediate impact in the first millennium or so of Egypt’s national existence.
World History
