Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/308

 2i8 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. other products of Ethiopian art, they are neither original nor interesting. The people who inhabited the region which we now call by the names of Nubia and the Soudan, had, indeed, reconquered their political independence a thousand years before our era, but they were not gifted by nature with power to assimilate the lessons of their former masters. Even durinof the short period when the Ethiopian monarchs reigned over a divided and weakened Egypt, Ethiopia remained the clumsy pupil and imitator of the northern people. She never learnt to give to her royal pyramids the air of grandeur which distin- guishes the great structures of Memphis. The Ethiopian pyramids were generally so narrow and steep in slope that their whole character was different from those of Egypt. In Egypt the base line was always greater than the vertical height, upon the Upper Nile the proportions were reversed.^ The latter edifices thus lost some of that appearance of indestructible solidity which is their natural expression. They remind one at once of the obelisk and the pyramid. Add to this that an unintelligent taste overspread them with ill-devised decoration. Thus the upper part of their eastern faces, for they are oriented, generally bears a false window surmounted by a cornice, about as incongruous an ornament as could well be conceived, and one which expresses nothing either to the eye or the mind. We shall, therefore, take no further notice of these more or less ill-designed variations upon the type which was created by the Egyptians in the early days of their civilization and fully understood by themselves alone. We must return, however, to that type for a moment, in order to show, in as few words as possible, how far the art of workinof and fixinof stone had advanced even at the time of the first dynasties. The Great Pyramid affords us a curious example of the elaborate precautions taken against the violation of the royal tomb (Fig. 132). At the point where the ascending gallery ' Thus the Great Pyramid was 482 feet high, while the length of one side at the base is 764 feet On the other hand, the " third pyramid " at Gebel-Barkal (Napata) is 35 feet square at the base and 60 feet high ; the " fifth " is 39 feet square at the base and nearly 50 feet high. Their proportions are not constant, but the height of the Nubian pyramids is always far greater than the length of one side at its base.