Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/248

 220 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, colours, too, are as bright and uninjured as upon the day when they were last touched by the brush of the artist." ^ The figures of men and animals to which our attention has been given all belong to the domain of portraiture. The artist imitates the forms of those who sit to him and of the animals of the country ; he copies the incidents of the daily life about him, but his ambition goes no farther. All art is a translation, an interpretation, and, of course, the sculptors of the mastabas had their own individual ways of looking at their models. But they made no conscious effort to add anything to them, they did not attempt to select, to give one feature predominance over another, or to combine various features in different proportions from those found in ordinary life, and by such means to produce something better than mere repetitions of their accidental models. They tried neither to invent nor to create. And yet the Egyptians must have begun at this period to give concrete forms to their gods. In view of the hieroglyphs of which Egyptian writing consisted, we have some difficulty in imamnino- a time when the names of their deities were not each o o attached to a material image with well marked features of its own. To write the name of a god was to give his portrait, a portrait whose sketchy outlines only required to be filled in by the sculptor to be complete, Egypt, therefore, must have possessed images of her gods at a very early date, but as they were not placed in the tombs they have disappeared long before our day, and we are thus unable to decide how far the necessity for their production may have stimulated the imaginative faculties of the early sculptors. In presence, however, of the Great Sphinx at Gizeh, in which we find one of those composite forms so often repeated in later centuries, we may fairly suspect that many more of the divine types with which we are familiar had been established. The Sphinx proves that the primitive Egyptians were already bitten with the mania for colossal statues. Even the Theban kings never carved any figure more huge than that which keeps watch over the necropolis of Gizeh (Fig. 157, Vol, I.). But Egypt had other gods than these first-fruits of her reflective powers, than those ^ Gavaukl Charmes, La Reorganisation du Musee de Boiilak {Revue des Deux Mondes, September i, 1880). He is speaking of the fragment which is numbered 988 in the N'otiee du Musee. According to Mariette it dates from a period anterior to Cheops. It was found near tlie statues of Ra-hotep and Nefert.