Lighthouse Books for Translation and Publishing: A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. II (of 2) (ePub)

We have seen that sepulchral and religious architecture are represented in Egypt by numerous and well preserved monuments. It is not so in the case of civil and military architecture. Of these, time has spared but very few remains and all that the ancient historians tell us on the subject amounts to very little. Our best aids in the endeavour to fill up this lacuna are the pictures and bas-reliefs of the tombs, in which store-houses, granaries, houses and villas of the Pharaonic period are often figured.

It is not always easy, however, to trace the actual conformation and arrangement of those buildings through the conventionalities employed by the artists, and we must therefore begin by attempting to understand the ideas with which the Egyptians made the representations in question. Their idea was to show all at a single glance; to combine in one view matters which could only be seen in reality from many successive points, such as all the façades of a building, with its external aspect and internal arrangements. This notion may be compared to that which recommends itself to a young child when, in drawing a profile,2 he insists upon giving it two ears, because when he looks at a front face he sees two ears standing out beyond either cheek.

In these days when we wish to represent an architectural building exhaustively, we do it in geometrical fashion, giving plans, elevations, and sections. To get a plan we make a horizontal section at any determined height, which gives us the thickness of the walls and the area of the spaces which they inclose. An elevation shows us one of the faces of the building in all its details, while the transverse or longitudinal section allows us to lay the whole of the structural arrangements open to the spectator. Plan, elevation, and section, are three different things by the comparison of which a just idea of the whole building and of the connection of its various parts may be formed.

Let us take as an example a representation of a house from a Theban tomb (Fig. ), and attempt to discover what the artist meant to show us. In the left-hand part of the picture there is no difficulty. In the lower stage we see the external door by which the inclosure surrounding the house is entered; in the two upper divisions there are the trees and climbing plants of the garden. It is when we turn to the house, which occupies two-thirds of the field, that our embarrassments begin. The following explanation is perhaps the best-that, with an artistic license which is not rare in such works, the painter has shown us all the four sides of the building at once. He has spread them out, one after the other, on the wall which he had to decorate. This process may be compared to our method of flattening upon a plane surface the figures which surround a Greek vase, but in modern works of archæology it is customary to give a sketch of the real form beside the flat projection. No such help is given by the Egyptian painter and we are forced to conjecture the shapes of his buildings as best we can. In this case he was attempting to represent an oblong building. The door by which the procession defiling across the garden is about to enter, is in one of the narrow sides.