Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/306

 2/6 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, less favourable than that of his Greek successors. This position, too, was materially affected by the fact that the best site in the temple, the centre of the naos, was reserved for a symbol, some- times living, sometimes inanimate, which was looked upon as the true representative of the god. It was to this symbol, jealously hidden from all but the high priest and the king, that the prayers of the faithful were addressed. It has been called a survival from the early fetish worship. Perhaps it was so. But at present we are only concerned with its unfortunate results upon artistic development. His statues being excluded from the place of honour, the sculptor was not, as in Greece, stimulated to combine all the qualities ascribed by the nation to its gods in one supreme effort of his knowledge and skill ; he was not raised above himself by the desire to produce a work which might give point to the magnificence of a temple and augment the piety of a race. Mariette was right in insisting upon this difference. " The temples," he says, " hardly contain a statue which is not votive. Sometimes these statues are found irregularly distributed about the foundations or in the sand, sometimes they are of large size and are arranged along the walls, but they hardly ever exceed the life-size of a man. I cannot say that each temple had a figu^'e which could be specially called the statue of that temple. The divine images were plentiful enough ; but each had its own particular ministration. In the prayers addressed to it the name of its consecrator was always included. Such a thing as a statue forming the cent^^al object of a temple and representing its god without votive appropriation did not, perhaps, exist I' ^ Figures of Sekhet, the goddess with the head of a lioness, have been discovered in hundreds in the buildincr at Karnak known as the Temple of Mouth, or Maut. This mine of statues has been worked ever since 1760, and all the museums of Europe have shared the results. ^ Being so numerous these statues could not have reached great excellence of execution. They were ^ Mariktte, N'otice die Mitsce, p. 16. See also his Catalogue General, c. i. 2 Mariktte {Karnak, p. 15) calculated that this temple, whose major axis from the pylon to the sanctuary hardly exceeded 300 feet in length, must have contained 572 statues, all in black granite, and differing but little in size and execution. If placed in rows against the walls, and here and there in a double row, their elbows would almost have touched one another. The first and second courts, and the two long corridors which bound the temi)le to the east and west, were full of them. One of these figures is represented in our Fig. 39, Vol. I..