Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/307

 The Principal Themes of Egyptian Sculpture. ' u devotional objects produced in mechanical fashion, and there is little chance of finding a masterpiece of sculpture among them. In an inscription at Karnak we find Thothmes III. boasting of having endowed the temple with a statue of Amen " such that no other temple could show one equal to it." ^ This Amen must have excelled its rivals in richness of material and in perfection of polish. It is unlikely that it was much superior to them in nobility or true beauty. The position occupied by the statue in the cella of a Greek temple finds something like a parallel, however, in the rock-cut temples of Nubia. We allude to these groups of three or four figures, carved in the living rock, which have been found seated in the farthest recesses at Ipsamboul, Derri, and elsewhere. These figures are now so mutilated that their merit as works of art cannot be decided. We may safely say that if the temples proper, such as those of Karnak and Luxor, had contained master-statues corresponding in any way to those of the Greeks, they would have been of colossal size. But although the soil of Thebes is almost paved with the fragments of royal colossi, not a single vestige of any gigantic statue of Amen has ever been discovered. All that we know of those tew divine statues to which special veneration was paid excludes any idea of size exceeding that of man. The statues of Amen and Khons, at Thebes and Napata, which nodded their approval when consulted by the king as to his future plans, were certainly not colossi.- And as for the figure of Khons, which took a voyage into Syria to cure the sister-in-law of one of the latter Ramessids, we can hardly believe it was more than a statuette."^ In spite of their number the statues of the gods must have attracted much less attention than those of the kines. The Pharaoh who built a temple filled it with his own effigies ; his colossi sat before the gate, they helped to form those structural units which we call Osiride piers, and figures of smaller size were ranged under the porticos. In that part of the Great Temple at Karnak which dates from the eighteenth dynasty, statues of ' Mariette, Voyage dans la Ifaufc-Egph vol. ii. p. 25. - Maspero, Ajinuaire de V Association dt's Etudes Grecques, 1S77, p. 133. ^ See the often-quoted story of a voyage taken by a statue of Khons to the country of Bakhtan and its return to Egypt. De Rouge, Etude sur un Stele Egyptienne apl-aitenant a la Bibliothique Xatiotiale, Svo, 1S56.